Matt Stauffer:
Abed, hello. All right, ah dang it. Welcome back to Laravel podcast, season three where I mispronounce everybody's names. Today I'm talking to Abed Halawi. I think that's right. He did lots of great packages and stuff, you'll learn more soon, okay bye.

(music)

All right, welcome back to another episode of Laravel podcast, season three where I mispronounce people's names. I actually got it wrong right before the intro, but then he corrected me. So it's, so the syllable its the emphasis on the wrong syllable. I'm talking to Abed Halawi. And I'm going to let him introduce himself, where he's from and I tell you guys all this every single time when I do this, but I'd like to switch it up between people that you have heard of before.

You know, you know an Adam and you know a Taylor and you know whatever. And people who, within certain communities they're well known. They made an amazing package, they're a strong community leader or something, but the whole rest of the world might not know about them. So, the guy I'm talking to today, is a little more in that second one. So I want him to tell us a real quick bit about so who are you? Where do you live? Where do you work? And what are a few things that you are known for in your world?

Abed Halawi:
All right, so you got my name almost right, this time.

Matt Stauffer:
All most, I'll take it.

Abed Halawi:
It's Abed Halawi, in our language. In English usually it's Abed Halawi, so the emphasis is on the middle of that-

Matt Stauffer:
Wait so when you say it, the emphasis is on the last syllable of your last name, Halawi. Not Halawi.

Abed Halawi:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh, okay.

Abed Halawi:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
All right, I'm getting there. Sorry, go ahead.

Abed Halawi:
So, I live in Beirut. I was born here and always been here. I currently work here as well at a company called Vinelab. What we do is, focus on the influencer marketing, building a SAS platform to provide influencer marketing to brands. Basically our website says it all, so if you'd like to know more about that, go to vinelab.com and that will tell you everything about that.

So I'm here because mainly about the Lucid Architecture which was first introduced in Laracon EU. The Lucid Architecture is about a collection of experiences that we went through, and we thought that certain ways would improve the ways we work together as a team. We thought that, well actually this is something very interesting and could help others solve their problems as well. The same problems that we've had and solved our way. So maybe our way could help others solve theirs as well.

That's one thing, and the other thing is Neo Eloquent, which is the package for Eloquent, and Neo4j. Neo4j is the graph database, and we use that library as the core storage library in our products, with which we bridge between Laravel project and graph databases.

Matt Stauffer:
So, there's a couple things you said there. If anybody was at Laracon EU, you would have seen Abed give his talk, was it two years ago? 2017? Or that was one year ago I guess-

Abed Halawi:
Yes.

Matt Stauffer:
... that and math is hard. But also make sure I put a link to that in the show notes. So you mentioned that and also you mentioned he maintains and created a package called Neo Eloquent which is kind of an Eloquent style wrap around types of Neo4j. If you ever heard anybody talk about graph databases, it's one of those things where, "Oh my gosh, graph databases are the new hotness." But I think a lot of people don't actually have a lot of experience working with them.

Real quick, before we get into your back story, I'd love for you to give me a tiny little pitch on each of those. I don't know if you're familiar with the phrase elevator pitch, but it basically means, imagine you have 30 seconds on an elevator ride to convince a potential user, or founder or funder or something like that, of why your thing's great. Can you give me the elevator pitch, the 30 second pitch on Lucid Architecture, why is it different, what does it help you with? And then I want to get the same one for Neo4j and graph databases.

Abed Halawi:
All right, no pressure.

Matt Stauffer:
None at all.

Abed Halawi:
Okay, so Lucid, it's about eliminating legacy projects completely. You would never have to move to a project that you've worked on three years ago, and say where does this go? Where is this piece of code that I'm looking for? Where do I find this happening? How is this feature implemented? What's the structure of the code? All of these are eliminated with the Lucid Architecture, which basically takes over from where MVC leaves off.

Matt Stauffer:
What's the one biggest difference with how Lucid Architecture organizes its code relative to your normal MVC project?

Abed Halawi:
It compliments MVC projects. So it's not a replacement MVC, but basically with MVC, and the controller, you almost have everything. This is where things get a little confusing in controllers, I mean, if you have a project A and you have a project B to each by a different separate team, in the controller if you go there you will find things written differently. And this is where Lucid comes in. What Lucid says that each controller method, only has one line, only. This line is to serve a specific feature. A feature, specifically, is a class by itself. And within that feature, you would define the sequence of steps that accomplishes this feature and we call them in Lucid, jobs.

So as each step in the feature is a job, and each job does only one things and is responsible for performing one thing only. You can share jobs between different features, but each job can do only one thing. And each feature serves one user story from the controller. That way you can achieve what we always dream about achieving with MVC, which is the thinnest controllers we can ever reach.

Matt Stauffer:
Is it similar to envocable controllers, or do your controllers have multiple methods but each of those methods only have one line?

Abed Halawi:
You can say it's close to what a command bus pattern is. So you can think of your controller as the command bus, and your just executing commands.

Matt Stauffer:
Got it.

Abed Halawi:
The commands take different forms. It could be a future or could be a job, so the same form repeats itself.

Matt Stauffer:
Got it. Okay, and if anybody wants to learn more, it's all written up in the, well it's both written up in the Github, which I'll link, but it's also in your Laracon EU talk, which is on YouTube, and I'll link that one as well.

But since this is not an architecture podcast at the moment, it's a person podcast, let's move on real quick to talk about Neo Eloquent. So, Neo Eloquent I understand gives an Eloquent style interface to Neo4j. Let's, if you had to give the elevator pitch again, this time, can you give me a quick elevator pitch for graph databases, and what makes them a little bit different from traditional relational databases?

Abed Halawi:
Sure. So, with the graph databases, the way we store the data, and visualize the data, and manipulate the data is the same way we think about the data. So the first thing we do when we start a new project, or data modeling for a project. What we do is draw circles and connections between these circles, which later on gets translated and transformed into tables and foreign keys et cetera.

But with graph databases, the way you draw the first data model with your hand, on a board, is the way it is stored right away. And you can manipulate that.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Abed Halawi:
You can also implement traversal and all the graph algorithms that we study about through out our computer science journey. So, you can apply all of these to the data that is stored.

Matt Stauffer:
And if anybody, like me, does not have a computer science background, when we're talking about graphs, the easiest way to think about that is when people talk about a social graph. They think about everything being based on relationships, on relationships, on relationships.

Abed Halawi:
Exactly. And a relationship is what we call a first class citizen in the database.

Matt Stauffer:
Right, where as with relational databases it's a little more second class, essentially-

Abed Halawi:
Exactly.

Matt Stauffer:
... with foreign keys and everything. Okay cool. Well I'd love to talk more about those things, but today ain't the day for that. So, I want to know a little bit about you. So before we go into your backstory, I'd like to know, first of all, when you meet somebody at the supermarket and they ask you what you do, what do you tell them?

Abed Halawi:
These days I find it very easy to talk about these things, from how it used to be when I first started. Because, today, especially with today's generation, they take technology for granted. Right? They're born and growing up in the world where cloud is the normal. Right? So, if I were to explain this, I would maybe go to an example by saying, okay I'm a robot, and you tell me what to do. I will do everything you tell me.

So this is how it first starts. So when they tell me to do this and do that, I would do them. Then I would say, this is exactly what I do with machines. I will give instructions to machines so that they run them when I am not there. So they keep doing that.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, so what is your actual role, are you a developer, are you a tech lead? What's your official title?

Abed Halawi:
My official title is tech lead.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Abed Halawi:
But, we're a start up-

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, a little bit of everything.

Abed Halawi:
... this is where things ... yeah exactly.

Matt Stauffer:
You can call yourself CTO if you want, right?

Abed Halawi:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. The thing is, with start ups, mostly, we get the opportunity to wear different hats. Which is interesting, so that we can get horizontal and vertical expertise.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Abed Halawi:
So, by horizontal I mean, different technologies, different areas of technologies, say front end, back end, dev ops and everything related to that. And at each area we get to grow vertically where, we improve ourselves and our skills in each of these areas. This is the most interesting about being in a start up.

Matt Stauffer:
You mentioned having a computer science degree, so I want to hear a little bit later about the path you took from computer science degree up to being a part of a start up. Real quick, were you one of the founders of the start up or did you join in after it started?

Abed Halawi:
I'm not the founder, but I'm the first employee.

Matt Stauffer:
All right, so you're employee number one. So, we'll talk little bit later about your journey from graduating with a computer science degree to being employee number one of a start up. But real quick, when did you first get into computers?

Abed Halawi:
I was very young. Basically around, I was nine years old, maybe ten years old. And our neighbor had a computer, and I used to go there just to watch them play, they did not allow me to play. My brother used to play, he said. But later on I had my own computer at home, but with no internet, so encyclopedia was our way to go to search for information back then. And mostly gaming. So, we were kids, I enjoyed gaming mostly. [crosstalk 00:11:40]

Abed Halawi:
Delta Force and you know these games. Also strategy, like Edge of Vampires, Red Alert, you know the early versions of those. Yeah. But then, later, the reason why I joined or took the computer science path was a bit of a coincidence-

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Abed Halawi:
... kind of. Because at first, I was into medicine, so I wanted to be a doctor at first. I went to the university where I started studying that, for a year. But, after half of that year passed, I did not find myself there. I felt that I'm not doing what I'm supposed to be doing. And the thing is, I passed all my exams and passed everything, and I was doing good.

Matt Stauffer:
Sure.

Abed Halawi:
But then, later on, I couldn't feel it. It was just that thing you get at a later stage of doing a thing for a while. Then you say I don't feel like doing this my entire life.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Abed Halawi:
Mainly because I was interested in neurology and everything related to the human brain and human mind. It has kind of a minor to psychology, that's a side interest. But at some point, I decided to shift majors, and I was looking at what universities are in the area that are close by. Saw a software engineering class, by mistake, basically because I was looking at the different area of courses. There was software engineering and I was like, what is software engineering. And didn't know what that was. I went in, I saw a lot of things that had to do with computers, and I though, well that would tell me how these games have always worked.

What's interesting is that, I'm going to jump a little forward to say that, with computer science, I've found myself finding out about how humans operate, and psychology specifically. More than I think I could have with medicine, because the amount of people who are using technology today can tell you a lot about how it had changed the way we live. It's everywhere. And it has changed almost every industry.

So when you're in technology, it's not only about the code that we write, it's not only about having programs that are written just for the machine to work, but it's more about satisfying the human need. This is the essence of these things. One thing that I had recently a small chat about that has to do with how designers can get to know more about technology, and how technology or developers get to know more about design and maybe do it themselves.

The way I like to think about it is that, designers don't need to know technology or development, and developers don't really need to know design, and do it themselves. It's the bridge between them lies in a different area. It's philosophy, it's psychology, it's the bridge between those two. So if these two areas can learn more about these, I think this will close a huge gap between these two areas.

Matt Stauffer:
You're reminding me a lot of my favorite conference talk I've ever given, which was about empathy. And, I made a lot of the similar pitches, from a little bit different angle than you're talking about, but that understanding people and satisfying people is the best way to be a good programmer is not to know the code better than everybody else, it's to know the end user better than everybody else. And to empathize, both with end users and also, the other developers on your team and the designers and everything like that. I love where you're going there.

I moved from working at a non profit where my job was about people, and understanding people, and helping people grow, to running a company. There's a lot more similarity than I expected between the two, because I'm still working with people and helping people grown and helping people do a good ... so I couldn't agree with you more about that and I love hearing you say that.

Abed Halawi:
Exactly

Matt Stauffer:
So, you're not the first person to say this. One of my most recent interviews, I can't remember exactly who it was, said the same thing of, "You know what, I wanted to figure out how the games work." So that's really fascinating to me, so, you got in, did you find yourself in there saying, "Oh this is amazing. I love this, this is so great." Or, did you get in there and did you have a moment of being kind of dissatisfied where you said, "Oh I thought it was going to be fun and games all the time and all I'm learning is math." What was your actual experience in those computer science classes?

Abed Halawi:
At first, I didn't know what to expect. I did not know what computer science was all about. So, with that in mind, and I started learning by myself on the side. Besides what I was being taught at the university. I was very interested in the field. I did not expect to learn everything all in the first day, right?

So, with that expectation in mind, I started finding out that I'm good at this. It's all about recognizing patterns, right? I really did not care where I'm putting most of my effort, because I know that everything that is being taught and channeled to us as students is to orient us towards having a certain mindset, so that at some point in the future, we know where to use these techniques and methodologies.

It was a bit later in my studies, maybe it was the second year of university that I've discovered that university will not teach you everything. Right? Maybe it was a little late for that, but I knew then that this is not a place that will teach you everything. But what they will do, is teach you how to think about problem solving. How to think about the computer science. And how programming works.

It's just the basics and fundamentals, you don't really need to learn every computer language, and every technology out there from university. They just put you on the path and it's all up to you, in terms of where to go and how to take this further.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah that's good. So, you did that. Were you having to choose to specialize in a particular type of programming and everything like that, or did you just you got a degree in software engineer or computer science and then you were out in the workplace and had to find something? What was the next big decision you had to make, after you'd made the decision to go into computer science?

Abed Halawi:
It was the second year also, where I joined the company where I used to work, as a support agent. You know, the regular things, tickets, answering tickets, forums and answering the phone and helping people get their job done on the platform. And at some point in there, as I was studying and working a full time job, the technical department had a certain problem they were trying to solve. I was overhearing, I wasn't very involved in their works, but as I was overhearing and it was in the kitchen where I spent most of my time-

Matt Stauffer:
Nice.

Abed Halawi:
... I overheard this problem they were having that had to do with data storage and transferring data from a place to another. I don't really remember the details of that problem, but I remember, throwing out a word that helped them solve it. And then they were interested. So I was working on this Java project for the university and the head of the developers came into the room and saw me coding at work, which I was not supposed to do. So he asked me, "Why are you coding? This is not your job here." And I said, "Well, I enjoy this. I like to do this when I don't have anything else to do." It was then, when he asked for me to join the development team and start learning web development.

It was kind of passive, the way I started learning about web development and the web technologies. But at the same time, I was enjoying doing it.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Abed Halawi:
I enjoyed programming on my free time. And after moving there, the kind of choice I had to make was which area to fill? Because they had an area that had to do with software programming, installed software programming. And they had a web application programming, which was a portal that involved all the areas of the company.

So this was the administration interface of everything that everyone does in the company. It was going through a revamp. And I had the chance to join the team who was doing this revamp, and I did not know anything about web development. So I started learning there. Right?

It was very tough. That's the least I can say, because back then, I don't remember, there wasn't much courses online to learn from. It was mostly either books or CDs that I'm not proud to say this, but we had to get the cracked version, or the pirated versions of those, so that we can learn.

This was basically my transition from being a support agent to starting to work in development. From there on, it was a regular journey where I continued exploring this realm of technologies. So sort of a front end development, doing a little bit of JavaScript here and there. It was, JQuery was booming, at the time. So I started learning that. I was very interested in animations, on ... so it was some kind of an interest between design and implementation of things. I like to see things move on an interface.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Abed Halawi:
With JQuery, I had the chance to do it with very easy instructions. That was the catch for me to say, "Well, I'm glad I chose this major. I'm glad that I'm here today. That's definitely how I'd like to spend my time."

Matt Stauffer:
Nice. That's very cool. So you were still in school when you were doing all this stuff? Wow.

Abed Halawi:
Yes. Basically I-

Matt Stauffer:
Did you sleep?

Abed Halawi:
... graduated ... I don't remember doing that no.

Matt Stauffer:
Sorry what were you saying about graduating?

Abed Halawi:
Yeah, so basically computer science to study it here, it takes three years, maybe four, with the regular courses. But it too me five plus, because I was working full time so I started understanding that work will teach me much more about practicality than the university will. But still, I was very interested in topics that were given at the university that had to do mostly with organizing work, anything that's related to diagrams, planning, software engineering, and how to organize the work.

There was many non tech courses that I was interested in as well, that has to do with management too. So I was learning a bit of both types of programming. It was high level where I learned the web stuff, and it was low level, where I learned the theories and everything that had to do with how a computer works, behind the curtains.

It was very interesting. And then I graduated after five years, with three years experience, full time. Which was at the time was, I was very happy to have done that. It was one of the best choices I've ever made.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. And so, what was the road from there to being employee number one at your current start up? Was there a lot of different jobs in between there?

Abed Halawi:
No not much, actually. There was one failed start up that I founded in the university. They had this program where they opened what they called the innovation center. It was a room for people who would like to build their ideas in there. They bring some students together. And if one of these ideas make it, through certain specified competition that they do across universities here, you have to make it for at least the first three positions. If you did they would invest, not money, but they would invest in helping you push this further.

Matt Stauffer:
Cool.

Abed Halawi:
Which is what you need at the time, right? As a student that's all you need, a place to apply the work, and an idea to put all the code in place. And that's the first thing after the first job. Then there was a job for a year where I also did a lot of web programming. I learned a lot of Linux there, because I was handling also system administration.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Abed Halawi:
And then, after that, I was here where I am today. It was interesting because when you're joining a start up, there's merely any guarantee that this is going to work.

Matt Stauffer:
Right.

Abed Halawi:
There's merely an idea based on a certain gap in the market. And I can easily say that this has been almost six years. It will be six years in October. And I can easily say that we've pivoted a lot through out these six years, and it's been the best six years I've ever had. From personal and technical, it wasn't only technical, because when I first started there I was the only developer, and most of my time I was just coding. But then things started to grow. And as a company it started to scale.

At the beginning we were doing services, so with services you get exposed to a variety of types of projects. There were mobile projects, there were web projects, and there were things in between as well. So this variety created a lot of needs for the team to grow.

As the team grew, my role expanded as well. So I had to occupy a larger gap in the team, and cover not only technical and coding, but it was mostly organization and management to take over. This was a real, I don't know what's the biggest word than challenge. I would say more than a challenge. Because, as a developer all you like to be doing and spending your time doing is coding. But then, if you code and not know where this code is going, at some point these things get lost. So we need to organize things.

And what's interesting is this led to creating the Lucid Architecture, because as much as there was chaos in the development process that we were implementing at the time, we had this huge need to organize things, not only from personal and communicational perspective, but also in the code itself. We had so many projects running at the same time and every time we switched between the project and another, it felt like going from one country to another. It felt like you were looking at something that's red and then you're looking at something that's yellow, and then that's white and then that's black. It's a huge difference between those.

So, this was the inception of Lucid, where it tries and makes sure that all these projects are normalized.

Matt Stauffer:
So you felt some kind of chaos, you're switching contexts a lot, and the contexts were different enough that it felt too chaotic and you had to relearn each one. So you created something that applies more of a standardization across projects than what MVC provides. You said, "Now when I entered a new project, and obviously it's much more complicated than this but, I know that every single web request will be serviced by a single feature or job, basically." And you were trying to make it such that on every project it uses the same architecture.

Abed Halawi:
Exactly.

Matt Stauffer:
Have you had the opportunity to use it on a pretty significant diversity of projects, or is it still something pretty new for you?

Abed Halawi:
We're currently using it, so we are implementing microservices, and with microservices, each service we have is a Laravel installation of the Lucid Architecture itself. We currently have around 48 services running at the same time, so you can easily say that we've implemented Lucid in 48 projects.

Matt Stauffer:
Right.

Abed Halawi:
So far and they're in production-

Matt Stauffer:
Are those 48 all serving the same primary product, which is the influencer related stuff, or is it a whole bunch of different products that are all offered to influencers?

Abed Halawi:
These 48 services are in the same product.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Abed Halawi:
It's the SAS platform that we're building. On the side we have some side projects that we use internally, that they're also based on Lucid. I would count two or three are currently running, and they are all in production in life.

Matt Stauffer:
I am going to ask-

Abed Halawi:
So we're pretty confident-

Matt Stauffer:
No, no, you're good. It's a little bit of lag. I'm going to ask you a few questions about Lucid. I can tell you're confident, I can see it in your face and hear it in what you're saying.

So, since every single controller method, all it does is it just serves one of these features. A feature is then meant to specifically parse the request, which I assume it gets out of the application container, and also return results. Is it safe to say that a feature, or maybe a job, let's say a feature for now, is the same as a controller method in terms of its scope, in that it takes an HTTP request, and returns and HTTP response?

Abed Halawi:
It is exactly that.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, so, it's obviously more complicated, but the simplest way to think about it is, when you're thinking about those 200 line long controller methods, pull that thing out and make it a class. That's the first step.

Abed Halawi:
One class.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, so it's very interesting because I gave a talk at Laracon US that talked about, among other things, quite a few code patterns for how to simplify your 200 line long controller methods. I didn't talk about Lucid, but I talked about things you can extract, so that those things in there are pulled out into individual classes. What I kind of recommended more at that point was, well here's a way to simplify the response part, using a custom HTTP response, or something like that. Here's a way to simplify the input part, by using custom HTTP requests, or something like that. Here's a way to customize the database queries, using repositories or whatever else.

So I'm super interested to take a look at this and try it out. Are there any open source projects that are using Lucid?

Abed Halawi:
I'm not aware of any. An open source project as in a full Lucid project that is currently operating and is online with it?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, like if somebody wanted to go see what it looked like, to use an actual functioning application using Lucid?

Abed Halawi:
There's definitely an example that is on the Github repo. There is work being put into having video tutorials that can teach Lucid in depth. But having a Lucid project online as an open source means, basically that you're exposing the whole project, so that's interesting thought. I'd definitely like to go in something like that.

Matt Stauffer:
At Titan, we have a whole bunch of ideas that would never make any money. But we just like to provide them as a service, and so we open source their code. So if you one say, "You know what I'd really like? I'd like a website that does X, Y, and Z for me." And you know only 500 people would use it. And those 500 people would never pay any money for it. Or, maybe they'd pay $10 a month for it, but it's not actually worth trying to do all the marketing. Maybe that might be an opportunity for you guys to actually have a real functioning website, that has real users, that has to service real user requests and everything is completely transparent.

Because I think that's one of the most interesting ways to have these conversations, and to expose our internal ideas to the world around us. And really let them up to the light of criticism outside of our own organization. We have some ideas at Titan that sound good, until they get exposed to the outside air. And I'm not saying that's going to happen with Lucid, but that is something that has been super valuable for us.

Abed Halawi:
I would love if that would happen, actually. That's a lovely idea. I'll definitely invest into that.

Matt Stauffer:
Cool. Well if I ever have an idea I'll throw one your way. But I would say that would be a good selling point for you guys in Lucid to be able to have something like that, that people can really see.

This isn't the Lucid interview, as much as I'm interested in these things, so tell me a little bit about your time working with start up. You said when you got started there, you did client services, what I assume by that is you were a consultancy, people hired you to build products for them.

So I have a couple questions. The first question I want to ask is, what changes happened to your text stack over the years? When did you come across Laravel? And what aspects of Laravel made you most interested in using Laravel when you decided to use it?

Abed Halawi:
I first started using Laravel when it was Laravel Three, version three-

Matt Stauffer:
That's been a while man.

Abed Halawi:
Yeah, that's a long while. What's interesting is that the project that we built back then was shot down a few months ago, so it was still running until today. That's what makes it, yeah, makes it very interesting. The thing that got me about Laravel was, I can easily say it's the documentation at the beginning. When you read the documentation, you literally understand how much potential this framework has, and how much you can open up and build on top of that. It's easy to start with. We started this project, it took us two, three months and we were up with an administration interface for multiple websites that we had for different clients.

That was when we first started Laravel. The text stack back then we Laravel, MySQL database with regular Apache web server, and later on we had this project where it was a publishing platform. This was the first pivot in the business model, so we stopped doing services and then we shifted into building our publishing platform.

And with that, there was also ideas about user generated content, and actions that users can take on content published by celebrities. From our services that we've done, we've built a lot of the user network of celebrities that are A class in our region. And from there, we thought, let's build a platform and join them all together where they can have official news and posts that can also integrate with social media, and have people join that platform as well.

This is where the first search for a database that can really mimic what the social network would be in data. That was where we discovered Neo4j. This is where we started building the outcome, so that we can build that platform, and we did, for a while and then we figured, that's not really the gap in the business. We were just doing that because we thought it was the point of entry into the entertainment business.

But then we also pivoted that into a SaaS, a platform where we can gather data from social media, because if it was for marketing it was booming these days. Especially in the region, it came a little late than we predicted. So we knew this was coming very soon. We thought why not build a platform that can bridge all of this.

This was the second shift. This was also the shift from a monolith, a single application, single code base, into microservices, which was a completely different set of challenges that we were facing. Things that we took for granted, like networks, and connections, and discovery services knowing about each other, and communicating between applications. This was taken for granted in a monolith because you don't really have these problems. But once we shifted to microservices, a huge new set of challenges just popped up. We never thought we would have these.

And we had a lot of trouble getting around with these tools because we were not experienced in that area. So we had to learn a lot before we could do it, as we do it today. I wouldn't say it's the right way-

Matt Stauffer:
Sure, sure.

Abed Halawi:
... it's just we're doing it and it's working right?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. I hear that. We're getting close to time and I want to make sure that I've asked all the questions I had. Oh, tell me a little bit about Lebanon, and tell me a little bit about Lebanon as a developers, and tell me about Lebanon as a Laravel developer.

Abed Halawi:
All right, so Lebanon in general, is this small country that you can barely see on the map, let alone Beirut, if you were able to spot that on the map. So it's a very small country, but it's faced a lot of political stuff happening, going around, wars and internal civil wars and then people not liking each other politically et cetera. So this is all going on, even though all of this is happening, the tech community managed to ... well the start up and entrepreneurship communities managed to rise from all of this that was happening.

There are certain areas in Beirut where they are dedicated to provide as much as they can, have the humanities to run any idea you have, you can rent, just like any accelerator, or an incubator program. There's plenty of these here today where we can rent a small desk and do whatever you have to do from there.

Internet connection was a huge problem, it's becoming much better now a days. If this was to happen a couple of years ago, we maybe couldn't have done this at all. Due to the internet connection, but now a days it's become much different. As a developer, there's plenty of talent in here. We enjoy sharing the knowledge, sharing everything we can get from abroad and from here, from each other.

The only problem is that there isn't much people in here. So, it's a double edged sword, right? Everyone knows everybody, but it's the same people that they always see at the events. You don't really get to ... you know this networking time, that you get in conferences, you don't really get to network. We know each other.

We try to go abroad for these, more than doing it locally. But at the same time, when we were first starting, there was no community. We did not feel that there's this connection, this circle of people that are trying to build something together. Build a hub of knowledge, hub of experience that they can share among each other.

But now, what we're trying to do is tighten the, or strengthen the connections between these people so we can build the more full circle that can incubate everyone in the community as much as possible. And show whoever is starting to get into the technology or development that there is a place for them here. We don't really need to go and work abroad, we can do it from here. We're trying our best to do that.
As a Laravel developer, there's plenty of people who are using Laravel nowadays.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Abed Halawi:
We gather, we talk a lot about what we do, differently in Laravel, and we talk a lot about how eloquent it is ... exactly. And the way that we can write code and we exchange a lot. We try to provide a lot of open source to each other, open source libraries, and tell each other, well I've written this small script, why don't you use it? Because we know each other, we know what we're working on, right? If we find a common interest, one of us would contribute that and provide it to the rest.

So it's a very small community I would say, but it's very interesting because it's still sustaining. For almost six years now, it is sustaining and is growing.

Matt Stauffer:
That's really cool.

Abed Halawi:
So I find it, yeah, I find it really cool here to have, I mean for anyone who knows Lebanon and knows how many people there is here. To find this, that's amazing. That's all you need. You don't really need to have much more than this. The only issue in here, is scale. We cannot apply what we work on at scale.

Matt Stauffer:
Got it.

Abed Halawi:
And we cannot scale what we work on unless it's provided internationally. And to go international from here, it is really tough, unless it's a branch of an international company that is working here, but provides the business from abroad. It is really not much room for you to scale, compared to other places. That's the only drawback.

Matt Stauffer:
I did not realize how small it is, because Beirut has a similar population to the very small feeling town that I live in. And I used to live in Chicago, which has, I think it's two and a half million people. And Lebanon entirely has six million people. So I now understand what you're talking about, scale wise.

Abed Halawi:
Exactly.

Matt Stauffer:
How far of a drive ... I assume Beirut is kind of like the technical center. Are people coming into Beirut for a lot of meet ups and stuff like that? Is that even that far of a drive?

Abed Halawi:
It's not far. I mean, it's relatively far, because of the traffic, it is way too far man. But if you were to just measure the numbers you would say, well that's, to you, that's not even a drive. It's just a walk.

Matt Stauffer:
What's the furthest somebody comes into Beirut for a meet up or a conference who lives in Lebanon?

Abed Halawi:
No, they do. They do, they do come from-

Matt Stauffer:
Furthest drive, is it an hour, is it 30 minutes is it 5 hours? What's it look like?

Abed Halawi:
Five hours? You would be in a different country.

Matt Stauffer:
That's what I thought.

Abed Halawi:
But-

Matt Stauffer:
It's a couple hours max.

Abed Halawi:
... it's a couple of hours drive.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Abed Halawi:
Well, what's interesting is that we have this, an institution, a small institution called SE Factory. SE standing for Software Engineering Factory, which where they teach Laravel to graduating students.

Matt Stauffer:
Really? That's really cool.

Abed Halawi:
Yeah. It is. The more interesting thing about this is that people come to Beirut to study this, on a daily basis from 9:00 in the morning until 7:00 at night, and going over two hours drive from their country towns.

Matt Stauffer:
Wow.

Abed Halawi:
Yeah, it's a long drive and you have no idea how draining to energy it is to go through all this traffic on a daily basis, to be able to learn this.

Matt Stauffer:
That's the first group I've ever heard of that is teaching Laravel as a part of a code school. I'll ask you for the link later and I'll put it in the show notes for everybody. SE Factory. That's really fascinating. Okay.

Abed Halawi:
It is.

Matt Stauffer:
I've one last question for you, and that is, what is the best book that you have ever read. It doesn't have to be about programming, just a book across the board.

Abed Halawi:
Oh yeah, that's a very interesting question because my favorite book is the one that was given to me by the Laravel community when I went to speak at Laracon, we had a dinner, before that. They gave us all books, and it was Godel Escher Bach, which is the book that bridges so many topics. It's between art, and science, mainly and music of course.

This is a book that really manifests how I like to think about technology nowadays. Again, it's not about just coding. It's more than that. It's about understanding, well there's a lot of creativity in there to be put. There's a lot of potential and opportunity for someone to expend and to put their all into this and make something out of it.

It's endless. The way that these areas were immersed together in this book is fascinating. You just get to see that philosophy, music, and science, they're all in the same place. And how they bridge and share the same fundamentals in terms of creativity, it was very interesting.

Matt Stauffer:
I'm reading through the preview on Amazon right now, and it's definitely triggering some ... I studied English Literature in school, there's a lot of philosophy in there, but I was as a technologist while I was there. It's definitely, just reading through some of the basic intro stuff here I'm going okay, this is both scary and exciting in seeing those things. But this is super intellectual though.

Abed Halawi:
It is.

Matt Stauffer:
At least it looks like it is, okay yeah.

Abed Halawi:
Yeah and you would feel, after you read this book you would feel like wow, that's a lot that's happening. I'm in a field that's much bigger than I thought it was. It's not the infinite statements that I've written. It's much more than that. That's what makes it more interesting.

Matt Stauffer:
This is fascinating. Okay, well I'm putting a link to the book in the show notes. It's Godel Escher Bach The Golden Braid, or A Golden Braid or something like that.

Abed Halawi:
Yes.

Matt Stauffer:
An Internal Golden Braid.

Abed Halawi:
An Internal Golden Braid.

Matt Stauffer:
I will link that in the show notes. Well thank you, I'm really happy. I'm very pleasantly surprised that it was not a programming book, and that was very good. Well we're past time, so I have to cut, which I hate doing, but I have to do. So if people want to follow you or if there's any other last thing you want to shout out or something like that, how do you want people to kind of, what's their one take away? Should they follow you on Twitter? Should they go try out some product? What do you want them to do?

Abed Halawi:
Sure, so on Twitter, that's one. On Github, that's two and it's the same identity all over the place. It's Mulkave, that's the username that I use everywhere. So if you look up Mulkave on Google, you'll get all my contact mediums and everywhere. There's also the tech blog of Vinelab, where you can find the introduction to also Lucid and stuff we do at work here. Which could be interesting also to look at.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. And I'll link all those in the show notes. I do have to ask, what is Mulkave?

Abed Halawi:
Oh, well, I told you I was into gaming when I was young and there was this game, about vampires.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Abed Halawi:
And there was this clan of vampires that are intellectual they're called the Malkavian. I found the introduction of this clan, and the people in this clan, to be very much matching my personality and character, so I thought well, I'll just choose that. One day I had to choose a user name, and so I was like Mulkave, whatever [crosstalk 00:51:18]-

Matt Stauffer:
The best user names are ones where you know that forever you're going to be able to get it on any social network no matter what. So I like it.

Abed Halawi:
Exactly.

Matt Stauffer:
Awesome. Well, I really appreciate you taking your time to talk to me.

Abed Halawi:
Thank you very much.

Matt Stauffer:
People who don't know, we have never met before, and I asked around, I said hey I want to meet people in different communities, so Abed was recommended to me and we had a chat a couple weeks ago. I said yeah, this is definitely someone I want to talk to, and it was a total pleasure. I really appreciate it and thanks for your time man.

Abed Halawi:
Thank you very much for having me on this podcast, I really appreciate your time as well. Thank you.

Matt Stauffer:
Welcome back to the Laravel podcast, season three. Today we're going to be talking with Freek Van der Herten, (pronounced) something like that. He works with Spatie, and they make packages and do all sorts of great things. Stay tuned, you'll learn more.

Matt Stauffer:
All right, real quick note going into this episode. I just moved offices, and I only noticed after moving that the movers bumped the gain knob on my audio. So it's not going to sound great. I apologize ahead of time. But don't blame Michael, it's not his fault. It's my fault. Sort of the movers, but mainly just me. All right, let's get on with the episode.

Matt Stauffer:
All right, welcome back to the Laravel podcast, season three. This is a season where we learn about all sorts of amazing people. You may have heard of them before, you may not have heard of them before, but they're all absolutely incredible, and if their name is not English, then I also mangle it terribly and they fix it up for me.

Matt Stauffer:
Today we're talking to ... okay, Freek Van der Herten, (pronounced) something like that, who is one of the leads ... [crosstalk] Oh, no, you're going to do it for me in a second, and then you can grade me on how well I did. And you're also going to have to grade me on how well I do the name of your company, because I have been told that I say it wrong. So, Spatie, which apparently is close but not quite right. So that's a company. They make packages, they do open source Laravel stuff, all this kind of stuff. You've seen their open source packages, used those packages, you've seen his blog, you've seen him on Twitter, all that kind of stuff.

Matt Stauffer:
So the first thing that I'm going to ask him to do is first say his name and his company's name right. Second, grade my pronunciation and see if he can make me do it any better. And third, ask the first question we always ask, which is, when you meet people in the grocery store, how do you tell people what it is that you do?

Freek Van der Herten:
Okay. Let me pronounce it just right. My name is Freek Van der Herten. I work for a company called Spatie. And I would rate your pronunciation an 8 out of 10 or a 9 out of 10, so it's pretty good. You did it pretty well.

Matt Stauffer:
All right, for an American, that's a pretty good number, so I'll take it.

Freek Van der Herten:
So at the grocery store, if somebody asks what I do, I simply say that I make websites, I'm a programmer. So I try to make it really easy, because I am mostly on the back end stuff, and for people that are not into back end, that's all a little bit fuzzy. And with websites, they immediately know, oh yeah, he creates those. Yeah.

Freek Van der Herten:
And I always say, I'm not going to install printers. That's not my job. I program stuff.

Matt Stauffer:
That's perfect, because if you say I work with computers, that leaves that open. You might be a networking person or something like that. So I can hear in your pronunciation a little bit of the ways that I'm off. So I'll go back, listen to this 10,000 times, and see if I can get it right. But an 8 out of 10 or a 9 out of 10 for a Southern American, I'm going to take that as a win.

Freek Van der Herten:
It's pretty good, man.

Matt Stauffer:
Right. So I mentioned this real quick, but Spatie, Spatie, whatever it is, they have 10,000 packages. Some of our questions are going to be about all of the Laravel packages you have, a little bit about your tweeting and your sharing of content. But of course, if anybody doesn't know who he is, just check him out. So I also don't know ... I know that I asked you personally, and I know where your Twitter handle comes from, but not everybody else does, and I don't actually know how you pronounce it. So tell us your Twitter handle, where it comes from, and how you actually say it in your mind.

Freek Van der Herten:
Well, my Twitter handle is @freekmurze, and it's actually a very good question, where it comes from. Freek is just my first name, but I have actually three names, and that's not that uncommon in Belgium. Most people have multiple first names, and mine are Frederick, because Freek is just a nickname, actually. My second name is [inaudible 00:03:59]. And the third name, which is a very special name, I don't think anybody has it now, it's Murzephelus. And Murzephelus is a name given by my parents, and it's an emperor, it's a Byzantium emperor, because both my parents are lawyers, and when they had me, there was this law in Belgium that you had to pick the name of your child from this big list of names that were approved, and they wanted to see what the city clerk would do if they just picked a name out of history that is not on that list. So they picked Murzephelus-

Matt Stauffer:
Rebels. I love it.

Freek Van der Herten:
And the clerk didn't say anything, they just wrote it down.

Matt Stauffer:
Nice. Very cool. It's funny, because-

Freek Van der Herten:
And I've also passed it down to my kids. So they also have Byzantium emperor names.

Matt Stauffer:
I love it, that's awesome. It's funny, 'cause when I first looked it up, I was like, oh, Mur-zeph-el-us. But it sounds a lot more regal when you say Murz-e-phlus.

Matt Stauffer:
All right, so that's your Twitter handle. So go follow him on Twitter if you don't know, he's got a newsletter and a blog. And one of the things that Freek does a lot is collect together the best stuff from other people, and so Spatie creates an incredible number of packages. Quite a few of them are original content, but one of the things they also do is they take stuff that other people are doing and they package it up together in a normalized way. So if somebody says, here's a thing on Laracasts or here's an idea or something like that, they will often make a package around it. And Freek both writes his own articles, and the people at Spatie write their own articles, and then they also collect together links to articles from other people around the community. So they're both creators and curators, and that's something kind of they're known for. So if you haven't seen them, go check out that stuff that they're doing.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, that's fun. Moving on, when did you first get access to a computer? In what context, and what was your interaction with that computer like?

Freek Van der Herten:
I started using computers at a very early age. It was actually, also, my dad had bought a ColecoVision. I don't know if you know that console.

Matt Stauffer:
I've never heard of it.

Freek Van der Herten:
It was very big in the '80s, I think around '82 or '83. So I must have been three or four when my dad had a console and he let me play on it, and that was the first time I interacted with this on a screen.

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, yeah, it only had games on it, and that was the first time I interacted with something and saw something moving on a screen.

Matt Stauffer:
Got it.

Freek Van der Herten:
Now shortly after that, I think two years after, we got our first computer in the house, which was, I think ... It was definitely a Macintosh, and I think it was an SE model. It's one of the first models. So my dad was a little bit of a computer freak, and he wanted, he had to buy this new stuff. So I started out with a System 6, I think it was, on Mac OS. And, yeah, I started ... yeah, there was a program on there called, maybe some people know it, called HyperCard, which was-

Matt Stauffer:
I've heard of it.

Freek Van der Herten:
It's a very simple application, which makes it very great. It's just a stack of cards which you can programmatically do stuff with. You can say, if somebody clicks here, go to card number three. If somebody clicks here, go to card number five. So I started to ... And if you click here, play a sound or display this image. So I made my first ... I don't know if I can call it computer programs, but I made my first projects with that little ... little games like that. So that was-

Matt Stauffer:
That's funny how different Mac and PC are, because I know about HyperCard, I saw it in school, but I never worked with it. But my first one was BASIC, and it's probably around the same time period. I was six or something, so it was around late '80s, early '90s.

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
And it was such a different experience. I was learning syntax and code and able to do almost nothing, whereas with the Mac, it's giving you this visual, interactive system, and it's such a difference even back then of what you're getting from each of them.

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, 'cause at the school, we had a Windows computer. Yeah, a Windows 3.1 computer. But the Windows subsystem, that was just a shell. You had also MS-DOS behind it, and when I saw that, I thought, what is this? I'm going back in time, we have something way better at home. We have this thing like a mouse on there.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting.

Freek Van der Herten:
So that was fun. So I've always been busy with computers and creating my own little things on it.

Matt Stauffer:
Did your interests keep up through school? Did you always think of yourself as a computer person?

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, I always knew I wanted to do something with computers. I studied IT as well, so I'm one of the lucky ones. At a very age, I knew I wanted to do this. But IT is very big, so I did a lot of things on my computer as well. At one point, I also did some sound technology, some songs, because that's another passion of mine. I'm also busy with music, I have my own band, and-

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, you're going to tell us more about that in a second.

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah. So way before Laravel was there, when I still had time to do other stuff, I created music as well. But that helps a little bit with all the background, right, the background right now.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. You know what, I actually am going to pause there. What musical instruments do you play, and it sounds like you were also recording. Were you doing mixing and mastering and production and everything?

Freek Van der Herten:
Just recording stuff, and a little bit of mastering, but then I'm not really good at it.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.

Freek Van der Herten:
My musical taste is a little bit lo-fi, so what I recorded was lo-fi as well.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.

Freek Van der Herten:
So I started ... My first instrument was, I think, the saxophone, when I was 10 years old. I had to do that for my parents. Yeah, you have to do musical school.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.

Freek Van der Herten:
But I didn't like it that much. I think the first two years were great but then I wasn't interested in the saxophone anymore. I tried to pick up the piano, and did a year of piano. And then I learned guitar myself, and that's an instrument where ... I stick a little bit by. So in all the bands that I-

Matt Stauffer:
Do you play acoustic or electric more? Sorry.

Freek Van der Herten:
It's more electric these days, 'cause, yeah, I play in a band and I have my electric guitar installed there. So I do that more. I do a little finger picking at home. I have the acoustic guitar here. But it's not as much as I used to.

Matt Stauffer:
What style of music do you play?

Freek Van der Herten:
It's a style called krautrock. I don't know if you know that.

Matt Stauffer:
I don't. You're going to have to send me the link later so I can put it in the show notes.

Freek Van der Herten:
Well, it's like this ... It's my favorite kind of music. It's like ... house music, like dance music. Very repetitive. But with guitars instead of electronic instruments.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, all right.

Freek Van der Herten:
So there's some good bands that you should check out from the territory. It's very big in the '90s, there are bands like Can and Neu! And the ideas behind those bands revolve around ... with how, how do you say it in English, how can we keep things interesting with the least amount of notes? With three notes, what can we do. Just by repeating them, we'll make it interesting again.

Matt Stauffer:
Very interesting, yeah.

Freek Van der Herten:
And that's an aesthetic that I really like, just the simple things. The fertile things. Not too many whistles and bells with it, but just fertile, pure, straight to the point.

Matt Stauffer:
It's funny, 'cause when you said repetitive, the first thing I thought of was jam bands. And a lot of jam bands are a lot of noise. You've got 20 people on stage, but they're very repetitive and they're not interesting to me, because everybody's playing the same noisy notes over and over and over again, so it seems almost the opposite, at least in my very judgmental perspective, where you're trying to have very little noise, but actually keep it interesting.

Freek Van der Herten:
I've recently listened again to a few versions of a piece called In C. I don't know if you know it. It's a musical piece, I can't remember the author right now. It's probably going to go in my mind in a few seconds. And it's like 18 melodies of music, and it's 20 people playing them, and there are a few rules around it. When somebody plays the fourth tune, everybody still on the first tune should skip to the second. There can only be a gap of two. And then you go slowly to the end, and it lasts about an hour. And it's very simple melodies, but they interlock very, very well together. And it's not written on paper, how much times you have to repeat each melodic phrase. So every version is a little bit different.

Matt Stauffer:
Interesting, yeah.

Freek Van der Herten:
And that's interesting music to me.

Matt Stauffer:
So you could theoretically have one musician who's just really antsy to move on, and the whole thing would be done in 20 minutes?

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh, very interesting.

Freek Van der Herten:
That could be the case, yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Everyone's glaring at that one guy.

Freek Van der Herten:
There are hundreds of versions of that, but they're all amazing.

Matt Stauffer:
Very interesting, okay. Like I said, I'm going to get him to write all this down for us. Links in the show notes later.

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, sure.

Matt Stauffer:
I'm super interested to learn about that. So you said you don't do as much music now, is that true?

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, that's true.

Matt Stauffer:
I hear you right?

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah. So when I was a little bit younger, I think when I was around 20s, then I had a little studio in my own apartment, and I recorded lots of songs. That was my main hobby then. Nowadays, it's programming, but then it was every moment of free time that I had, I have to record stuff, I have to experiment with stuff, which is ... Yeah, sometimes I listen back to those recordings, like every five years or something, and I am still a little bit proud that there's something that I accomplished.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I spent that much time, I got that good, even if I couldn't do that right now, that's still something I did.

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

Matt Stauffer:
All right, well, I want to ask you more questions about that, but I also want to get to the end as well. All right, so when you first got into that, you said you had access to those Windows computers in school. So what did your school education look like? At what point did you start getting more than just typing lessons?

Freek Van der Herten:
I think when I was 14 or 15, we had lessons in a thing called Isolab. I don't know if that is a well-known program or not, but it's something we teach at school, and it's basically this grid, and there's a car in it and there are certain obstacles, and you have to write an algorithm to let the car reach a special end spot.

Matt Stauffer:
I want to do that now.

Freek Van der Herten:
And it's something to exercise things like loops, like memory, like and or not kind of stuff. And that are the first things that I learned to do. We also had a little bit of Visual Basic if you were ... I went into higher education, so we programmed things in Access. Access is this Microsoft database, where we had to program the streams and special reports and stuff like that, and I only got into programming, into real programming with computer languages, in higher education, where I got to learn C++ and COBOL. Things like that. Yeah, I learned COBOL.

Matt Stauffer:
Now, were you doing IT? Was it IT then, or were you specializing more in computer science?

Freek Van der Herten:
It was ... I don't know how you say it, how you translate that thing that I said it in English, but it's focused on practical IT. But it was in 1989 that I studied higher education, and yeah, internet wasn't as big like it is now. And we didn't have any lessons on HTML or the web. It was all on this enterprisey kind of stuff that we had to learn, like Java, like C++. Things like that.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Huh. So when you say secondary education, do you mean when you were 18 years old, or when you were 14 years old?

Freek Van der Herten:
Secondary education, that's from 12 years old to 18 years old.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh, got it. Okay.

Freek Van der Herten:
And when you're 18 years old, you go to higher education. Some people go to ... Most people.

Matt Stauffer:
So even in 12-18 years old, you were able to specialize, 'cause in the US, in 12-18, you just do whatever they tell you to do. There's no specialization like that.

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, there are.

Matt Stauffer:
So you were able to focus on a certain track.

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, yeah. From 12 years old, or I think from 13, you can really pick your direction if you want to ... a language kind of education, a mathematical based education, an IT kind of education. So you can make a choice there a little bit.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. And also did you ... Oh, go ahead.

Freek Van der Herten:
And of course, when you're 18, then you have much more choices, so they get you basically anything that you want.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. So where did you go after secondary education, then?

Freek Van der Herten:
So, I did my secondary education in my hometown, which is a small town in the northern part of Belgium. But I always knew that when I'm going to higher education, I don't want to live at home anymore. I want to live by myself. All my friends were in that mindset. We're 18, we're going to move, we're going to get away from our parents, even though we all love our parents, it's not [crosstalk]-

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.

Freek Van der Herten:
We're now grownups.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Freek Van der Herten:
So I moved to the biggest city in the vicinity of my hometown, which is a city called Antwerp.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, yeah.

Freek Van der Herten:
Where I've lived for a long time, and Spatie is still based here. And I went to school there, and I left home. My student life in the city of Antwerp.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. That's actually one of the only cities I know there, so that's a good win for me. I'm nodding, I actually heard of that before, that's good. Go me.

Freek Van der Herten:
You should come to Antwerp, it's a beautiful city. You would enjoy it.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh, I would love to. Yeah.

Freek Van der Herten:
It's not that far from Amsterdam.

Matt Stauffer:
I said in the last podcast, once you get Americans over to Europe, we don't want to leave, because it's so expensive to get over there, which is why it was so crazy. I was there for Laravel Live UK for five days and then came home. But the next ... I'm trying to get my kids to the age where I can take them over, because once I have the whole family over there, I'll just work from there. It doesn't matter. So I'm hoping someday in the next couple years, we'll get a whole month and just go see everybody in the whole Laravel world, and just stay in everybody's town for a couple days. So Antwerp's on the list.

Matt Stauffer:
All right. I won't get booted out of town, that's good.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, so you went out ... So what did you study? Was it continued practical IT, or was it something different when you went into higher education?

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, that was practical IT that I studied. So that was more enterprise stuff, things that I learned there. Things like C++, like some math was still there. Things like analysis, how do you cope with a big, big project. And looking back at it, I really like what I was taught there, but a lot of the things that I learned there, after the years, I thought, yeah, what they taught me was a little bit wrong.

Matt Stauffer:
I was going to ask how you reflected on your education. Is there more you can say about that? Is there broad strokes you can make about what was good and what was bad?

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, so something that has really stuck with me is in one of the first lessons, I was taught, and I did it for years ... It's a very practical thing. A function can only have one return statement. And that fucked my career up so bad.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I believe it.

Freek Van der Herten:
Enlightenment came only 10 years after. Hey, it's actually better to have early returns. But things like object calisthenics, I don't know when those ideas came, but they certainly weren't taught in school. So I'm skipping ahead 10 years now, but there was a time that I thought, man, I really wish that there were a few teachers back then that knew about the stuff that I'm learning now, because there is much more than the stuff that they taught me.

Freek Van der Herten:
It's not all bad. It's not all bad. They taught some good stuff as well. With the things I learned there, I landed my first job, which was something I didn't expect. I was a COBOL programmer for seven years or something like that, and I still remember when I was at the job interview, and they asked me, "So, what do you want to do?" And I said, "Anything except COBOL." And they gave me COBOL, and I did it for seven years.

Freek Van der Herten:
But it was kind of fun to do it. It was ... I worked for a major bank, maybe you know it. It's called ING. I think you have-

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah. I have, I used to have, or maybe still do. I don't know. For sure.

Freek Van der Herten:
I think they're operating in America as well, and yeah, I programmed COBOL there for the mainframe.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, wow.

Freek Van der Herten:
So we did the financial stuff. So it was kind of important, what we did there. And I still look back very fondly to that period, because I had very good colleagues there, and we could do amazing stuff. Even with an old language like COBOL, we could really do some ... We really could program some nice solutions. And sometimes I miss the scale a little bit of programming in that way, because it's like, one-fifth of the country has an account on ING.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Freek Van der Herten:
And that's kind of fun to work on.

Matt Stauffer:
I know we're getting ahead of ourselves just a bit, but I asked this of J.T. as well. Programming in COBOL, and the programmers who have been in COBOL for years, and the patterns and practices you have are a little different, I imagine, than working with Laravel.

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Is there something, one or two things, that you experienced or learned during your time there that you think a lot of us that haven't had that sort of experience could benefit from hearing about? Any practices or any maxims or any sayings, or testing patterns or anything that you experienced there that you wish more people knew about?

Freek Van der Herten:
Let me think. One of the things that I already did at the time is testing a lot, but it was in an old way, so I can't recommend that. I think what sticks with me most from the time is not a technical programming thing that we did, but the team we did it with. The client communication between the team, and we were ... within the firm, we were one of the first groups that wrote standards for ourselves. We were going to name variables like this, we are indenting our code a little bit like that. We're going to use prefixes for that. We're going to use suffixes for that, which was really beneficial. And that's something we do at our company, at Spatie now as well. And that's something I think a lot of people could learn a little bit from, just some guidelines and be very, how do you say that in English, I can't remember, just where everything is always the same-

Matt Stauffer:
Consistent.

Freek Van der Herten:
Consistence. Keep consistence. Things like a dash or an underscore or when you case things. They seem like, hey, it's not important, but it's actually very important when you work in a team.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I totally agree.

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, and that's something I picked up with working in a good team at ING.

Matt Stauffer:
Very cool. All right, so you got a job at ING right out of higher education, right?

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. So what made you move, and where'd you move to?

Freek Van der Herten:
Well, that's a good question. So when I was working at ING for a couple of years, there were plans to split up the branch I was working in. So I worked in the insurance branch, and ING sold it off to another company. So it became apparent that our team had to split and had to move to different cities, and at the time, I didn't want to move cities. So I went for another job in Antwerp, another company that also does COBOL. But I was a little bit shellshocked there, at ING, because I had worked there for so long. I had this network of people, and I could get things done. I didn't have to follow the rules. I could cut some red tape. But at the new company, I didn't have a network, and it was so, so very frustrating for me that I couldn't get any things done.

Freek Van der Herten:
Now, at the time, I also had a friend of mine called Willem, and Willem, he just started this little company called Spatie-

Matt Stauffer:
I was going to say, I've heard that name before.

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, and he was doing everything by himself, and everything by himself. He programmed a little, he designed a little, he did all the client work by himself. And I'm sure it came up at a band rehearsal that we have, I really hate my job now. And then he said, "Yeah, would you want to program for the web?" Because I felt that he couldn't do everything by his own anymore. He was good in design but he didn't like programming as much, so he looked for somebody that wanted to program a little bit.

Freek Van der Herten:
But I wasn't certain at the time. So I did a couple of stuff for Willem first. But there's no way to sugarcoat this, because I was so bored at my job, I started just creating websites at my job itself, because I had basically ... This is the honest truth. They didn't give me enough work. So they gave me an assignment. Yeah, this is your assignment for a week, and after two hours it was done. So I reported to management, give me more work. And they didn't give me more work. So I started programming for the web and learning stuff for the web.

Freek Van der Herten:
And after half a year or something, I said, yeah, this is silly. I'm just working for myself at this job, so I just quit. And then I started working for Spatie.

Matt Stauffer:
What's your official role there right now?

Freek Van der Herten:
I'm, I guess, the lead developer there, although I don't like the term a little bit. That's what we tell people that we meet. Freek is our lead developer. So I still do a lot of programming day to day myself, but I also help my colleagues getting things done. I don't like thinking about the lead, with the term lead programmer. The thing that I don't like is this is the one that makes all the decisions and does all the code stuff, but I don't see that as my role. I have to help the other people getting their job done, so that's an important factor of the things I do day to day.

Freek Van der Herten:
And there's also a little bit leading the company a little bit, because I'm a partner there, so there's a lot of corporate stuff I need to do there as well. But the best thing is-

Matt Stauffer:
How many people are-

Freek Van der Herten:
The best days are the days that I can program myself.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. I totally feel you. How many people are on your team?

Freek Van der Herten:
Right now, it's seven people.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. So the two of you. Is that five programmers, or are there any non-programmers on the team?

Freek Van der Herten:
There are now two non-programmers. Actually, we're at eight. We had a new hire two weeks ago. We're at eight now.

Matt Stauffer:
Congrats.

Freek Van der Herten:
We're with five programmers, one designer, and there is a project manager. So they handle client stuff.

Matt Stauffer:
Right, right.

Freek Van der Herten:
But our focus is in programming bigger Laravel applications now. So we started with smaller CMS kind of sites. But we moved on a little bit to the bigger things. That's also a story in itself, really.

Matt Stauffer:
Cool, yeah. Yeah, I don't know if we're going to have time for it, but I'm actually very curious about that story. But I have to pause this one time. Is there a sound at the end of the name of your company or not? Is it purely just Spatie?

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Cause sometimes I hear a little T, and sometimes I don't.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. Yeah. Spatie, okay. See, I was saying Spat-zie for a while, with a T. So Spatie (Spa sea).

Freek Van der Herten:
Spatie.

Matt Stauffer:
That's it.

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, yeah. That's perfect.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. Now it's 10 out of 10. I got an 8 out of 10 the first time, you didn't even notice. Okay. All right, so I do want to talk about your relationship with the company, what kind of stuff you're all doing, 'cause I think that there's a lot of companies that do Laravel, and there's not a lot of companies that have public presence that are creating a lot of content and stuff like that.

Matt Stauffer:
And so I think what I want to know is, let's not even talk about the company yet. Let's talk about you. When did you go from being a programmer to a programmer who had garnered a reputation as someone who created packages and taught stuff? How intentional was it, what did that transition look like? What was Freek being a programmer who did web stuff to being Freek being a well-known teacher? What'd the shift between those look like?

Freek Van der Herten:
Well, it certainly wasn't intentional. I think now, six or seven years ago, we were still ... This was the time before we did Laravel. We were creating sites with Zend Framework 1. CMS kind of sites. And I remember getting a little bit bored with it, because at the time, the B2B world was becoming a little bit stale, I thought. This was also free composer. There was another ecosystem that attracted my attention, and it's really no surprise. That's Ruby, Ruby on Rails.

Matt Stauffer:
Rails, yeah. Yeah.

Freek Van der Herten:
That's a story I share with a lot of people in our community, I think. So I created a few Rails sites, and I thought, yeah, we're ready to jump ship off PHP. PHP is done. But then Composer happened and Laravel happened. So we started doing Laravel sites, and in Zend Framework, we had this whole CMS, a homegrown CMS build up, and I wanted to have that in Laravel.

Freek Van der Herten:
Now, I wanted to do it a piece at a time, and at the time, there was this guy called Jeffrey Way. He started Laracasts.

Matt Stauffer:
This little site.

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, this little site. Very small. And he put out a video of how to use Travis and GitHub together. And my mind was a little bit blown that you could just run your tests and see in the interface of GitHub if your tests were passing or not. And the lesson of Jeffrey was also around package development, and I thought, yeah, I want to do that as well. So I'm going to try to write a package.

Freek Van der Herten:
And I think one of the first ones was ... I think the Geocoder one, which was a wrap around the Geocoder service of Google. Or it was a Browsershot, maybe, which was a package that used PhantomJS to create screenshots of a web page. And I put that out, and some people liked it, which was mind-blowing to me. There's somebody here that did a pull request to fix a typo? Wow. This is really awesome.

Freek Van der Herten:
So I thought, yeah. I have to write another package. And when I took a look again at the Zend Framework 1 CMS, I saw, yeah, there's MailChimp in here. There's Google Analytics. There's something called the media library to handle assets. And I thought, yeah, these are all packages. Maybe I should package them all up for Laravel, so it wasn't planned, but I spent the next two or three years just doing that, putting that out.

Matt Stauffer:
Just repackaging, yeah, yeah.

Freek Van der Herten:
Just repackaging the old Zend Framework in code, Zend Framework 1 code, to modern packages with all the stuff I learned on Laracast.

Freek Van der Herten:
Now, at the same time, I was still the only programmer at Spatie, so we were only a three-man company. And we had an internal platform, something Microsofty, I can't remember the name, where we put interesting links on. And I was discovering so much interesting good content on the internet, and I'd post it there. But my two colleagues, the project manager and the designer, would say, "We're not interested in the deep programming stuff that you're putting there. We're interested in the ideas, but not in the nitty gritty details."

Freek Van der Herten:
So then I thought, hey, I'll just start a blog and I'll just put those things publicly on there. This is the stuff that interests me, maybe other programmers are interested as well. And with that combination, with starting a blog and writing about those packages, I guess, yeah. It picked up a little bit from there. People just liked the contents that was there, both my own stuff as the links that I shared. And yeah, it totally grew from there.

Freek Van der Herten:
But it certainly wasn't planned, like we were going to be well-known with this, that was the plan from the get-go.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. I noticed this initial commit on Browsershot is May 2, 2014.

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
So four short years ago.

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I did a lot in the past few years.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. I think that it really helps to have some kind of structure to work along. The structure you're saying is, hey, you know what, I'm going to take this list of packages and I'm just going to work through them. And those sorts of structures that just give you something to work on next means you're never stuck asking the question, "Oh no, what do I do next?" You've always got something, you've just gotta make the time and put the effort in.

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, sure. And nowadays, actually the couple of past years, the most packages get born in client projects. So if there's a client project that's API-heavy, that we create some packages to make API development a little bit more easy in Laravel. And I also want to mention, because I'm talking about me here a lot, but now it sounds like that I'm the only one creating packages, but my colleagues do a tremendous amount of work on that as well. I want to emphasize that the open source efforts are a team effort, so it's not me alone. Although I'm the most known one, my colleagues, Brent, Alex, Seb, and Willem, do also incredible stuff out there.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. And actually, that's one of the things I was going to ask, because we're always figuring things out at Tighten ... We give everybody 20% time, so quite a bit of the work that's done at Tighten is done on those Fridays, but not all of it. Sometimes people are doing stuff on their own personal time. And you and I have talked a little bit in the past about what that looks like for you all, especially because you put out just such a prolific number of packages as a company. Are you able to make that much time available, or are people doing work at night?

Matt Stauffer:
So you and I have talked about it, but again, let's imagine that we have not. What does it look like for you, and what does it look like for the other people on the team, and how much of this stuff are you doing during the day job, and how many hours are you and the other folks working in the evenings, or nights and weekends, I guess?

Freek Van der Herten:
Well, for the company, we always plan the stuff that we need to do on Monday. We sit together and we say, "Hey, you're doing this this week. You're doing that this week." And we only plan four days. So for the fifth day, you can do whatever you want, but that fifth day, that isn't a separate day. It's like, the time in between. It's when you're bored with this project, yeah, go do something open source, write a blog post or write a package or whatever.

Freek Van der Herten:
So we have one day a week for everybody that can work on this open source stuff. Now, that's the theory, but yeah, in practice, packages get made in project time a little as well, because they're made for the project.

Matt Stauffer:
Right.

Freek Van der Herten:
So it's a little bit hazy, where to draw the line, a little bit.

Matt Stauffer:
Sure, sure.

Freek Van der Herten:
And I know that I spend a lot of time also open sourcing a little bit after the hours, because I like it. And sometimes, colleagues, when they have this good idea or a good vibe, I notice that they too do stuff in the evening, even though that's really not required to do so, it's really because they personally like--

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, just kind of excited about it, yeah.

Freek Van der Herten:
--just like doing this. And I think we've made so many packages now, it's really not such a big effort for us now to work on a package, because we know what the good things, the basic guidelines are for a good package. We know that have to have tests, we know that we need to have good documentation, we know how things like a service provider works. We have empathy enough now to imagine how people are going to use our stuff. So because we've done it a lot, it gets a little bit easier for us as well to do too. So people sometimes ask, isn't that difficult to invest so much knowledge and time in that? But I think for a company, it's kind of easy, because it has grown a little bit in our DNA.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.

Freek Van der Herten:
And if in a project, a colleague of mine says, "Hey Freek, should I package this up?" My default answer is, yeah, if you can do it, just do it. Take a couple of hours. Or if it's a bigger package, a couple of days extra, and just do it, 'cause we will benefit from it anyways. Maybe not because we are going to attract clients with it, but the programmer who made the package will become a better programmer. For Spatie it's good, because we have something in our package tool developed a little bit more. I always, when somebody takes an effort of making the package, I make sure that I mention the principal author of that package, which is not always me, also, on things. So everybody benefits with this.

Freek Van der Herten:
And I wish more companies would do this, 'cause if you take some time to do this, it isn't hard anymore. It just becomes part of your workflow to do this.

Matt Stauffer:
It's interesting, because at Tighten, we have a little bit of an inverse culture. People say, "Oh, we should make a package out of that." I'm like, "Are you sure that you want to maintain that for the next four years, 'cause if you don't, then don't make a package out of it." And I've actually talked people out of making packages, because I know that they don't yet understand what the cost of being an open source author looks like.

Matt Stauffer:
And it's not that I'm ever going to tell anybody no, but I am going to tell them, make sure that you know the burden that comes on. The moment people have this package in there, in their three years out of date app, what kind of customer support you're asking. And so I'm actually talking people out of it frequently, and what I'm more likely doing is when somebody says something interesting, I'm like, "Have you written a blog post about it? Have you written a blog post about it?" And quite a few people are like, "Yeah, Matt, I just put it on the list of 40 blog posts you're telling me I'm supposed to write. You have to start giving me more than one day a week to do these things."

Matt Stauffer:
But, no, I love your attitude towards packages. And one of the things that we've talked about in the past is we need all kinds of types. And for example, the packages we have at Tighten, there's only a few of them, and we maintain them back to Laravel 5.1. And one of the things you mentioned, is you say, look, we keep up to the most modern versions. And if somebody else wants to fork it and make an older version, then they're welcome to do so.

Matt Stauffer:
And so each group, each company, each author, has different things to contribute and to offer. And so I love the more people that are willing to make those packages, the more of a broad spectrum we have of people who are willing to participate in some way, shape, or form. There might be some company or some person who comes along, and their goal in life is to maintain all of Spatie's packages back to Laravel 5.1 or something like that, who knows. So each person is contributing a different thing to the community.

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, sure. Yeah, the cost of being a maintainer, it's a high cost sometimes.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.

Freek Van der Herten:
It’s good that you make people aware of that. For us, we carry the load as a team, so everybody does a little bit of maintenance, and we have the pleasure of having a lot of people in the community helping us out as well. For every package there are a lot of contributors there, so, yah, I’m pretty happy where we stand right now. And I’ve also learned to sometimes just let it go, you know? Two or three or years ago I wanted to have the issue count as low as possible, and now I’ve learned that that really isn’t important, if there’s some more stuff to do, just leave it open. I’m not obliged at all to do this kind of work unless I’m very happy to do it myself, you know?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, for sure.

Freek Van der Herten:
And this idea that you should be happy with this kind of work—that’s also where that idea comes from, that we only do the latest Laravel version, that we do the latest PHP version. Because this is what we use on our own project, and these are the versions we like working with. Nobody on our team liked working with the older Laravel versions. I’m not saying the older Laravel versions are bad or something, but we take the most joy from working with the latest stuff. So it makes sense for us only to do support for the later stuff in our packages as well. Unless it's very easy to support older things, then we do that as well, but we're also not afraid to just abandon an old package if we just don't like it anymore. No? It's not like anyone is going to sue us.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah it comes down to the question of what do you feel obligated to do? And I think there's often a perception, right or wrong, that once you put that code out there, you're obligated to maintain it. And interestingly I see both sides of the issue. On the one hand, I don't think that you could be forced to do anything. On the other hand, I could imagine somebody saying, "Well, I can't."

Matt Stauffer:
We have a lot of clients who can't upgrade to the latest Laravel or the latest PHP, because they're stuck on whatever Red Hat releases and they're several versions behind, and they're saying, "Man I'd really like to use that new Spatie package but I can't." But at the same time, what's the inverse? You have to do something? No, nobody can force you to do anything. I have bounced back and forth a lot of times. And I think where I've ended up is just saying, nobody can be forced to do anything.

Matt Stauffer:
Each person needs to be honest about what they're planning to do, and also the world needs to allow them to change what their plans are if they change what their plans are. And as long as your not manipulating or tricking people. Then you're an open source contributor, who's putting work out there in the world. People can consume it, and if they're not happy with it, they can take the responsibility to fix it up. If they're not willing to take that responsibility to fix it up then it's kind of like well, you're getting free stuff. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, is an American saying.

Matt Stauffer:
So I'm very sad because I have to go home to take care of my kids, but I can't leave just on that note because as always I ask people in Tighten what questions they have for you. I can't ask all of them because of my timeline. But I am going to at least ask you a few of them. So especially the ones that are the most esoteric. Number one, how many post cards do you get per month?

Freek Van der Herten:
We should get more. It's about, between 15 or 35. Something like that.

Matt Stauffer:
Your packages are postcard-ware. Which means basically, what you ask people to do is, if they use the package, consider sending you a postcard from where ever they're from.

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
I assume that most people don't feel the pressure to send you 5,000 postcards if they use your package, but you probably should at least get one postcard from each user. So listeners, if you've ever used a Spatie package somewhere, consider going and buying a postcard from your local and going sending it. They've got a thing on their website about it, I'll link it in the show notes. But it sounds like that number should be a little bit higher, so let's all go chip in there to thanks them.

Freek Van der Herten:
Thank, Matt.

Matt Stauffer:
The next random question, I don't even know how to pronounce this, so I'm just going to read the words in front of my face. Did Romelu Lukaku deserve the golden boot?

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah. I think he does. Or even Hazard.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Freek Van der Herten:
Those are two football players if you don't know.

Matt Stauffer:
I have no idea at all. There's a lot of people taking care about this but I don't, so.

Freek Van der Herten:
I'm not that big into football, but I did watch for the world cup. That's when I'm interested in the Belgium team. Looking at Belgium matches this time, was really amazed what our player Eden Hazard could do. Did some amazing stuff. So that's your answer.

Matt Stauffer:
Several people asked this, but I feel like you're not going to have this list ready. So if you don't have this list ready, just say, "I don't have this list ready." Some people asked, what packages have you made that have been adopted into the Laravel core.

Freek Van der Herten:
I think none.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh really. Okay well that's a no list.

Freek Van der Herten:
Wait, there are none in the dependencies but there are that few were totally-

Matt Stauffer:
Absorbed, yeah.

Freek Van der Herten:
Inter locked with I think migrate fresh is one of ours. That Dale picked up on because we made it. And I think there is another one, where if you, in Tinker, use a class name that it can fetch the fully qualified class name. We packaged that up.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah that was Caleb right?

Freek Van der Herten:
That was from Caleb.

Matt Stauffer:
Very cool. Alright, I didn't realize that got pulled into the core.

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, and that's in the core now, if you open begin session, and do one of the classes there, then it will try to get the fully qualified class name.

Matt Stauffer:
I like that, it's a joint Tighten Spatie effort.

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, cool.

Matt Stauffer:
Jose asks, which Artisan commands do you use the most?

Freek Van der Herten:
I think Tinker all day. All day I use Tinker.

Matt Stauffer:
Interesting.

Freek Van der Herten:
I have this package called Laravel Tail which can tail a log file.

Matt Stauffer:
That's the one that was pulled out of the old from the old Laravel right?

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, it was pulled out of Laravel, I don't know why. Because it was such a help. And I used it all day long.

Matt Stauffer:
I love it.

Freek Van der Herten:
Tailing stuff. Various make commands as well. So nothing too special there.

Matt Stauffer:
Alright, one last one. Marje asks, what was your most interesting challenge as a new developer?

Freek Van der Herten:
I think, getting to know the best practices in communities. It's so easy to adjust, to program a little thing, like a little PHP script, but how to do it well and how to structure it really well, that was really hard as a newcomer. To find good sources of information. And for PHP I know my way around. I know where I can find good stuff. I know where the people are. But if I want to get the feeling again, I know I can try to do some Elixir stuff or maybe even some JavaScript stuff and it's like I'm a newcomer all over again.

Matt Stauffer:
It's the difference between knowing how to do the thing and the best way to do the thing, right?

Freek Van der Herten:
Yeah, exactly. And it's comforting that in PHP, I have the feeling that I can be happy with the stuff that I write. I'm always learning of course. But it's difficult to have to in another language, because you're so familiar and it feels so warm doing PHP. But I have to force myself to do some other stuff as well.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I hear that. Well, as always, I can tell, I can talk for hours on several of our subjects, but is there anything you wanted to cover that we haven't gotten to today?

Freek Van der Herten:
If I can make a shameless plug?

Matt Stauffer:
Go ahead.

Freek Van der Herten:
I launched my first software service project, a half year ago. It's called Oh Dear. It's like the best uptime tool out there. It can also detect mixed content, when your certificates will expire. Things like broken things, you will get notifications from that. It's something, I'm really proud of and you should check it out. It's ohdear.app.

Matt Stauffer:
Yep. And we will link all this in the show notes. I will make sure that is all available there. The pricing of Oh Dear, it's based on the number or sites right?

Freek Van der Herten:
It's based on the number of sites and nothing else.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, so your site can be massive. It can have 10's of thousands of pages and you're not going to pay extra for it. So, definitely check it out. OhDear.app we'll put this on the show notes, we're always down for the shameless plugs. You took your time to talk to us so, we got to show you some love.

Freek Van der Herten:
Alright, thanks man.

Matt Stauffer:
Alright, so if someone wants to follow you, where's the best place for them to go to do that?

Freek Van der Herten:
I think it's twitter, is a good way. So by having this @freekmurze it will be in the show notes as well I presume.

Matt Stauffer:
Yep.

Freek Van der Herten:
Or by murze.be where I talk about the package developments that my team and I are doing. And where I link amazing articles of others as well. So my blog and my twitter account, that are the best ways.

Matt Stauffer:
Love it. Thank you so much for everything you do for our community. Thank you for your time, I'm sorry I'm cutting us short, we can keep going but, look forward to seeing you soon and thank you so much for joining us today.

Matt Stauffer: Welcome back to the Laravel Podcast, season three. Today I am interviewing Nuno Maduro. So hard to say. Creator of Laravel Collision, Laravel Zero, and lots of other open source goodness. Stay tuned.

Welcome back to season three of the Laravel Podcast. I have another wonderful member of the Laravel community with me. If you follow me on Twitter, you'll know that I went out on Twitter and said, "Hey, I want to make sure that I've got people from various communities represented, and I already have a long list of people who I want to interview." Nuno was actually already on that list originally, but somebody pointed out, "Well, he actually represents at least one of the communities that you're interested ..." Because what I said is, "I've gotten a lot of people from America, and there's a lot of certain areas where I've got a ton of people from. I want to make sure that the other geographic communities around the world are also represented."

This guy came up, so I said, "You know what? Let's take him. He's already on the list. Let's put him up at the top of the list and have an interview." First thing I want to do is, first of all, you're gonna say who you are, what you're about. You're gonna pronounce your name way better than I've been pronouncing your name, and the first question that I want you to also answer is, when you meet somebody in the grocery store, how do you explain to them what it is that you do?

Nuno Maduro: Yeah. My name is Nuno Maduro. If I actually say to someone that is not from computer science, I would say that I work with computers, okay?

Matt Stauffer: Okay. Yeah.

Nuno Maduro: But basically I'm a web developer. I work with Laravel daily, so yeah. That's it.

Matt Stauffer: Where are you from originally, and where do you live now?

Nuno Maduro: That is a great question, because originally I am from Portugal. That is a small country in Europe. Right now, I'm living in Paris, France. Basically I spent my whole childhood in Portugal, my study over there, and now I'm living in Paris with my girlfriend, and yeah. That's it.

Matt Stauffer: Is Paris easy to live in?

Nuno Maduro: Paris is a completely different place from Portugal. People in Portugal have some kind of a slower life. You know what I mean?

Matt Stauffer: Uh-huh (affirmative).

Nuno Maduro: In Paris, people have like speed every single day. The difference is actually amazing. In Paris, you also have lots of transports, so to go to work, you actually spend one hour in transports going to work, and after work, you spend another hour getting home. The difference is quite over there on transports. Of course, the salary aspect is also quite different. In Portugal, you don't have the same amount of money after a month, and yes. I think those are the main differences. I don't have family in Paris, so that is also not that great, I think.

Matt Stauffer: Did you live in a smaller city? Obviously smaller than Paris, but was it a smaller city when you were in Portugal?

Nuno Maduro: Yes. Portugal, basically it has two bigger cities, Lisbon and Porto. In Portugal, I was living in Leiria. That is a smaller city, and yeah. I was there. I spent my whole childhood in Leiria. That is a small town in Portugal. Quite different comparing to Paris. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. I just looked it up, and Portugal has a population of 10 million people.

Nuno Maduro: Exactly.

Matt Stauffer: Paris has a population of 2.5 million people.

Nuno Maduro: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: There's definitely a little bit of a shift there. I've lived in both big and small towns in the United States, and even just between them, I notice a lot of the shifts that you're talking about. The bigger the city, the faster people move, and the more time you spend in transportation a lot of times as well.

Nuno Maduro: Exactly. The most difficult part that I had when I moved from Portugal to France was the fact that I didn't speak French at all.

Matt Stauffer: Oh, yeah.

Nuno Maduro: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: That was actually my next question. How fluent are you ... How well do you speak French now?

Nuno Maduro: Now I speak French great. I think I speak better French than English right now.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. All right.

Nuno Maduro: But at the beginning, I was speaking English all the time, and in Paris, there is not that many people that speak English. It was difficult, but after three, six months, everything went fine, because I eventually got forced to learn French.

Matt Stauffer: Nice.

Nuno Maduro: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: I want to hear these stories more, but we should start off by ... You know, I always want to make sure that before we get in your story, people know, why is it that I'm talking to you? Of course you're a very nice guy-

Nuno Maduro: Thanks.

Matt Stauffer: ... so that's one thing, but there's other reasons. Can you tell me a real quick kind of intro to ... Now, I definitely know that Laravel Zero and Collision are two of the biggest ones that you're known for, but are there any others, and could you give me just a really quick pitch for each of those?

Nuno Maduro: Yeah. Sure. Basically, I spend all my time ... After work, I consider myself an open source package creator, and obviously the most noted packages I have created is Laravel Zero and Collision. Laravel Zero is kind of a micro-framework for building console applications. You can imagine Laravel for building web applications, and you can imagine Lumen for building APIs, for example, and Laravel Zero is for building just console applications. It's a very customized version of Laravel that have that specific purpose of building console apps.

Collision was a package that initially I've built just for Laravel Zero, but due to the fact that Collision basically shows you beautiful errors when you are interacting with your app on the comment line, Taylor actually liked that package, so it got included on Laravel itself, on the Framework itself.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Nuno Maduro: I also have small other packages on my GitHub account. Most of them are related to the console environment. Right now I'm working with a package called Laravel Code Analyze, though I'll probably change the name, but whole point of it is actually analyze your code and searching for bugs, or mistakes on your code. People at the beginning said it is impossible to do that, do all the magic on that systems, on Laravel, but I think I'm gonna make it right and make it work with Laravel. Let's see.

Matt Stauffer: Nice. I think I remember seeing, it's based on a static analysis package for PHP, right?

Nuno Maduro: Exactly.

Matt Stauffer: You're not inventing it all from scratch, so you're able to just customize that, just for Laravel.

Nuno Maduro: Yeah. Basically, I am writing extensions to make it, that package, make it work with Laravel. Make it understand Laravel behind the scenes.

Matt Stauffer: Very cool. I know that you're also involved in the Laravel Portugal Podcast. Are you a host, or what's your actual role there?

Nuno Maduro: I am the host of Laravel Portugal, yes. Basically-

Matt Stauffer: Okay. Sorry, not podcast, meetup.

Nuno Maduro: Yeah. It is a live show, a podcast, whatever.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Yeah.

Nuno Maduro: But basically, every Friday I get into that podcast with my friends, and we talk about Laravel PHP, and sometimes we bring actually long-time members of the Laravel community. You already have been there, and Taylor as well. It's great. I have a great time over there.

Matt Stauffer: That's cool. What's your day job? It's AlumnForce? Is that still where you work?

Nuno Maduro: Exactly.

Matt Stauffer: What kind of stuff are you doing there?

Nuno Maduro: AlumnForce is a company that builds social networks for many of our cities. You can see it like a small Facebook for each university, so a private social network. I'm working there as a backend web developer, mainly with PHP, Laravel, and also Microservices. Yeah. I think that's it. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. Cool. All right. We have a basic understanding of what it is you do day to day, some of the things that you do that you're known for, so let's get into the story of who you are, where you come from. You were born and raised in Portugal. I think you said it was called Leiria.

Nuno Maduro: Leiria. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: I've already acknowledged to everybody that I'm terrible at pronouncing everything, so I'll already own that. Tell me a little bit about growing up. What was your first interaction with computers? What was your first time, your first actual time using a computer, and maybe the first time that you really started realizing that that was something that was special for you?

Nuno Maduro: Okay. I must warn you, I don't have the most beautiful story, like most of your guests, okay?

Matt Stauffer: Everybody's story is interesting.

Nuno Maduro: Not mine. Let's see. Basically, I got my first computer when I was five.

Matt Stauffer: Oh, yeah?

Nuno Maduro: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

Nuno Maduro: When I was five, I got my first computer, but I can say to you that I didn't use it for programming or for coding. It was just for gaming, actually.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Nuno Maduro: All my childhood-

Matt Stauffer: What kind of games were you playing at five and six years old?

Nuno Maduro: Oh, those memories, man. I was playing like ... I can't remember early games, but I remember that when I was like 10 or 12, I was playing Age of Empires, FIFA a lot. You know FIFA, right?

Matt Stauffer: That's soccer.

Nuno Maduro: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: I've never played it, but I at least know the acronym.

Nuno Maduro: Exactly. Age of Empires. I can't remember, man, but I was mainly playing games on that computer. It was the same computer for 10 years, I think. It was great0t81es.

Matt Stauffer: Oh, nice. That's awesome.

Nuno Maduro: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: I just realized I call it "soccer." I'm sorry. Football.

Nuno Maduro: Yeah. In Europe we call it football.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Okay. You played games. Was it a desktop, I assume?

Nuno Maduro: Yeah. A desktop. Exactly.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. Age of Empires, I've never played, but I'm trying to translate time periods. You played a lot of video games. Did you have computer education in school at all?

Nuno Maduro: No. Not at all. Only on university.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. I assume you learned how to type at least playing the games and using the computer, but when's your first actual experience doing programming? Even anything as simple as building HTML or CSS?

Nuno Maduro: Yeah. I can tell you that, when I was 18, I wasn't actually sure about the study, what I wanted, but because I liked games, I pursued computer science.

Matt Stauffer: Oh, okay.

Nuno Maduro: I knew it was stupid, but at the time that was my thought.

Matt Stauffer: You figured, "Hey, I like games, so why not make them?"

Nuno Maduro: No. I didn't know what to do, actually.

Matt Stauffer: Oh, really?

Nuno Maduro: Yeah. I have to be honest, man.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Yeah.

Nuno Maduro: At the time, I went to computer science, and there, when I was 18-19, I started to work with HTML, PHP, and everything. But I must tell you that I wasn't the traditional geek or super talented developer. I liked computers, but I think I preferred football or be with friends.

Matt Stauffer: Is that still true today?

Nuno Maduro: Not today. No.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. When did that shift happen?

Nuno Maduro: That is a great question. While I was on university, I actually started my first job. I was doing my master at night, and have a full-time job on the day, you know?

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

Nuno Maduro: At that time, again, I was making money, and that is great, but I wasn't actually passionate for programming and for coding, and I remember that I was working on the local company, and I was working with Code Igniter, and PHP.

Matt Stauffer: Oh, okay.

Nuno Maduro: A friend of mine, because we went to start a new project, and I was saying, "Okay, another app with Code Igniter." And the friend of mine told me, "Why just don't you use Laravel?" I was like, "What is Laravel? Is it a new programming language?"

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Nuno Maduro: "Is it framework? I don't have any idea." I went home, I Google it, and I eventually got redirected to Laracasts. The big turnover was with Laracasts, because I wasn't passionate, like I told you, but with Laracasts I was actually consuming four, five hours a day.

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

Nuno Maduro: I was 24, 25, so I was consuming Laracasts like four, five hours a day, like a drug. Crazy.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Yeah.

Nuno Maduro: I was still in Portugal at that time, and yeah. I think I can say that Laracasts was my shift. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: Huh. That's really interesting. I'm glad. Jeffrey's gonna hear that, and he's gonna love that. Do you think you could say something about it that is what made the shift happen? Was it the style of teaching, or was it being able to ... Is there something about Laravel, or something? Could you name what aspect of it that was hooking you so much?

Nuno Maduro: I think it was the fact that everything was difficult before, and when I started with Laracasts, I understood that words like "solid design principles," everything that was complicated turns out to be easy with Laracasts.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Uh-huh (affirmative).

Nuno Maduro: The knowledge that I was consuming in such a short period of time, it was crazy, honestly. I think with Laracasts, I found my way of learning. That was super important. It was a big turnover, honestly.

Matt Stauffer: That makes sense.

Nuno Maduro: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Matt Stauffer: This episode has been brought to you by Laracasts. Just kidding. This is not a sponsored episode. I promise. That's really cool to hear, that you were able to find your way of learning outside of the context of Laravel, or Jeffrey, or anything else like that. Just you found a way that makes sense for you to learn. I think that you mentioned it wasn't even necessarily ... You didn't say, "Oh, this aspect of Laravel was what got me most excited." What is it that motivates you? Is it code that motivates you? Is it products that motivates you? In 20 years, do you want to be writing code? In 20 years, do you want to be running a company? Do you want to be making products? What motivates you most about working in tech?

Nuno Maduro: Right now, I really like the aspect of learning. Becoming better every single day, actually, I really like that aspect. To be really honest with you, I also like the fact that people are using my stuff.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Nuno Maduro: That's also the main reason why I built Laravel Zero, because it's not a package. It's a framework, so people will build stuff on top of it. I really like the feeling of people using my tools, my packages. I like the feeling of people heard about me on public speaking, for example, and that I think is the real motivation why I work hard every single day.

Matt Stauffer: What is your dream job?

Nuno Maduro: I don't have an answer for that. I think right now, I'm really happy about my current job and my current situation, because right now I'm doing remote work. I'm still in Paris, but doing remote work, and I'm really about my current situation. I work eight hours a day. At night, I have time for my own things, my packages, to read. I also go a lot doing Crossfit. Do you know Crossfit?

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Yeah.

Nuno Maduro: Yeah. I'm doing a lot of Crossfit at night as well. I think I'm really happy about my current state.

Matt Stauffer: Awesome.

Nuno Maduro: Of course I would like to be rich, but yeah.

Matt Stauffer: Sure. Sure. But the day to day experience of working the type of job you have right now is something that you really enjoy?

Nuno Maduro: Yeah, exactly.

Matt Stauffer: That's very cool. All right. Let's go back to early days. You were five years old. You had a computer. You were playing video games. Your first exposure programming was primarily in university. Did you have any classes at all? Did you even learn typing in school, or was there literally no tech of any sort in school prior to university?

Nuno Maduro: Prior to university, I didn't have any interaction with computers at school.

Matt Stauffer: Wow. Okay.

Nuno Maduro: Yeah, because I actually, on college, I was doing the mathematic course. You know what I mean?

Matt Stauffer: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Nuno Maduro: We didn't have actually access to computers at my course. So the only computer I'd interact with was my home computer, and it was for gaming mainly.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. What age is ... Because I don't always know how every different country handles it. At what age were you in college, and what age did you enter in university?

Nuno Maduro: 18.

Matt Stauffer: 18 for college?

Nuno Maduro: No, no, no, no. Basically, to college, I think it is 13, I think.

Matt Stauffer: Okay.

Nuno Maduro: And when you are 18, 19, you go to university.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. I don't know if you're familiar with the American concept of high school, but if you are, is that similar to what college is for you, or no?

Nuno Maduro: I think so. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. Got it. Makes sense. All right. When you were in college, you did specialize a little bit. You said you specialized, so you kind of picked a subject to focus on in college, or no?

Nuno Maduro: I think, yeah. College for me, it's like high school for you, so at that time I was, yeah. It was mathematics, science, but I didn't like it at all, as well.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Nuno Maduro: Like I told you, I wasn't the traditional geek, or something like that. I just preferred to be with friends, so I didn't specialize in something, something concrete.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. Outside of computers, outside of ... Wait, do you still play video games?

Nuno Maduro: Yeah, a little bit.

Matt Stauffer: What are you into most right now?

Nuno Maduro: League of Legends. Do you know?

Matt Stauffer: I know it's about superheroes, right?

Nuno Maduro: Exactly. It's really, really cool. I play a lot of League of Legends. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: I was into video games a lot until I moved away for ... Actually, I played some video games in college, or in university for me, but after that, I haven't played anything at all, so I hear about them through friends. I know I'm older than you. I don't know by how much, but when I was in college, we were playing Half Life 2-

Nuno Maduro: Oh. Those times.

Matt Stauffer: ... to give context to that.

Nuno Maduro: Yeah. I also have played Half Life 2.

Matt Stauffer: Nice.

Nuno Maduro: I probably finished the game more than once. It was great.

Matt Stauffer: Nice. Yeah. It's worth it.

Nuno Maduro: I was actually, when I was in high school, I actually made a lot of sports, so if you type "Nuno Maduro football," you will find me, and I was actually doing a lot of sports at that time. I really like football.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. That was actually my next question, where I'm going, is, outside of Crossfit, outside of computer programming, and outside of video games, what's the thing that you do that gives you the most joy in your life? What do you enjoy the most?

Nuno Maduro: Oh, I don't want to be ... I think I really like to be with my girlfriend as well. The weekend, for example, I am always with my girlfriend. Like, the complete weekends.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Nuno Maduro: Saturday and Sunday, I spend all the day with her. I go into the cinema, shopping, a lot of shopping. Yeah. Being with my girlfriend is probably one of the things that I really like to do.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. What do you think that is the most underappreciated or under-known aspect of writing a good application in Laravel? What do you look at the Laravel community and say, "If only everybody else knew this, their lives would be so much better"?

Nuno Maduro: I think the community aspect is probably one of the biggest points of Laravel. I believe that people underestimate the fact that Laravel have a great, great community. We actually helps a lot of each other. I can tell you, for example, Laravel Portugal Slack, we talk every single day about ... We ask for opinions for ... We have questions. On Laravel Portugal, for example, we talk about a lot of work. With the international community, for example, on Twitter, I use it a lot as well. I learn a lot with the Laravel community, and I think that is one of the strong points of Laravel, I believe.

Matt Stauffer: All right. One of the things that I always do when I'm gonna interview somebody on the podcast, I ask people in the Titan Slack, "What are some questions you want me to ask?" And it's always funny, because some of the people know the person I'm gonna be talking to, and so they say, "Oh, I've always been interested in this thing." Some of the people don't, and so they just throw out random stuff. "If you had to choose, would you prefer cake or pie?"

Nuno Maduro: Pie.

Matt Stauffer: Pie? All right. Taking it further down the road, which pie?

Nuno Maduro: Raspberry pie? I don't know.

Matt Stauffer: What, you're not sure? All right, so raspberry pie.

Nuno Maduro: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: Is that a programmer joke? Raspberry Pi?

Nuno Maduro: Yeah. I think, yeah, it's a programmer joke.

Matt Stauffer: Really, if you had every different pie that has ever existed in the history of the planet, right sitting in front of you, which one would you pick? He's totally Googling pies right now to find a picture of all the different options.

Nuno Maduro: Yeah, honestly. I really like chocolate. I like chocolate.

Matt Stauffer: Okay, so straight chocolate pie?

Nuno Maduro: I would probably choose ... Yeah. Yeah. I would probably choose like a black chocolate pie.

Matt Stauffer: Wait, black chocolate?

Nuno Maduro: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: The only time I've ever heard black and chocolate in the same term is when they're talking about, like, German. Is that the type you're talking about?

Nuno Maduro: I don't know. Actually, I don't know if it is in the States, I believe so, but there is different types of chocolate, so you have like the most-

Matt Stauffer: Oh. Oh, oh. You mean like a less milk, more dark?

Nuno Maduro: Exactly. Exactly.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. We call it "dark chocolate." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Nuno Maduro: Okay. Dark chocolate.

Matt Stauffer: Got it. Okay. All right. A dark chocolate pie. Okay. Have you ever had pecan pie? I think it's probably a very American thing.

Nuno Maduro: Never heard about it.

Matt Stauffer: Do you know what a pecan is?

Nuno Maduro: Nope.

Matt Stauffer: It's a nut. P-E-C-A-N. Yeah. Go Google that. I'm from a place in America where they don't have those, and I moved for school to a place, the south, where they do have them, and I live very close to where they all are. They make this pie that is essentially just like sugar and some kind of gelatin, and then pecans, and then the crust. That's basically the whole thing. I don't even know if it's suspended in corn syrup or something like that. You're just basically eating, like, pecan-flavored sugar mush, and it is one of the greatest things I've ever had in my entire life. If you ever get a chance to try that, you should.

Matt Stauffer: Very nice. All right. More questions for you. Next question for you is, "What advice do you wish you had gotten when you first got started programming, and what advice would you share with new developers today?" Kind of the same question.

Nuno Maduro: Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question. I think the most important thing to new developers is definitely, "Find your way of learning." Because it was the turnover for me, and I think if I knew that earlier, in my early days, I will be even better right now. Another thing that I consider also super important is the fact that you should open your ... Expose yourself to criticism. I can give you an example of open source, for example. Due to the fact that you do open source, you are actually exposing implementations, exposing your way of coding, and you are actually receiving criticism for free, you know?

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Nuno Maduro: You are understanding what are your weakest points for free, and you can evolve really quickly doing open source. I think, yeah, finding your way of learning, and also expose yourself to criticism, is two key points of being a better developer.

Matt Stauffer: That's good stuff. I like that. What prompted you to move to Paris?

Nuno Maduro: Yeah. She was in Portugal with me, but she always liked France, and when I was in Portugal, I had the feeling that I had to move to a bigger town, because I was a software developer, and after my first job, I had the need, actually, of moving to a big town. Since my girlfriend really liked Paris, and I had that need, we choosed Paris because of this reason.

Matt Stauffer: Got it. Yeah.

Nuno Maduro: Yeah. That was the big-

Matt Stauffer: You wanted to be somewhere big, and she wanted to be back in France, and it was kind of a good spot for both.

Nuno Maduro: Exactly. That, it's, exactly.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Yeah.

Nuno Maduro: I'm right in Paris for two years, three years now.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. It's funny, because I know you live in Paris, and a lot of my questions are there, but I also am sort of interviewing you as a representative of Laraval Portugal, so I also got some questions there. Let's say ... At least for Americans. I don't think this is probably true for most Europeans. For a lot of Americans, we know about Portugal either because of soccer or football, or honestly because there's a lot of overlap between American and Brazilian cultures. There's a lot of Brazilians in the US, and our economies and cultures are often very similar. We learn about Brazilian Portuguese. Obviously, that's just a language. It's not even necessarily exactly the same language.

Let's assume that people who are listening don't know much about Portugal, about the people, the culture, the food, the country. If someone were to visit Portugal, where should they go? What should they see? What should they experience? What would you want them to know? Prepare someone to go ... First of all, prepare them, and second of all, sell them. Why should someone come to Portugal? Tell me about it.

Nuno Maduro: Yeah. I have to say that I really love Portugal. Every time I'm on vacations, I go to Portugal.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Yeah.

Nuno Maduro: Most of because of my family, of course, but basically because I really like the country itself. Starting things off by the food, the food is just crazy. Everything is like homemade, you know what I mean?

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Nuno Maduro: It's really, really good. Each small town in Portugal have his own way of doing food. You can basically pick your car and eat different stuff every single town. It is really great.

Matt Stauffer: Okay.

Nuno Maduro: Something that I really like as well is the beach. Portugal is near the ocean, and you have beach all the time.

Matt Stauffer: Very nice.

Nuno Maduro: Yeah. Very, very nice. The weather is also magical. Yeah. In summer, for example, I'm always on the south of Portugal. Everything is not expensive, and I really enjoy those moments, to be honest.

Matt Stauffer: Huh.

Nuno Maduro: Also, the people. The people have a ... Like I told you at the beginning, people have a slower life. I don't know if this represents what I am exactly trying to say, but people are not that depressed, for example, comparing to Paris. You know what I mean?

Matt Stauffer: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Nuno Maduro: Not that stressed. That is also really good, because people are all the time smiling, for example. I don't have that in Paris. You know what I mean?

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Nuno Maduro: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: Do you get the sense that people in Europe understand that Portugal's a nice vacation destination?

Nuno Maduro: Yes. More and more, to be honest.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Nuno Maduro: People are actually trying to go to Portugal when vacations comes up. Just to go to the price of going to States, come from States to Portugal, I remember that I checked the prices to go to Laracon West, and the price of the tickets just for the plane itself, it was 2,000 Euros.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Yeah.

Nuno Maduro: It was super expensive, man. It was like, "I just can't afford this."

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Nuno Maduro: The conference ticket was the last ... It was the cheapest.

Matt Stauffer: Yup. Yeah.

Nuno Maduro: Being there, and the price of the tickets was the most expensive.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. I mean, for Americans, I know a lot of what we do is, you save up for a long time, and then you pay for that expensive ticket, and then you stay in Europe as long as you can, and just go see everything around there. Because once you pay to get over the ocean, you don't want to have to do that too often.

Nuno Maduro: When was your last time on Laracon EU?

Matt Stauffer: I wanted to go this year, and it overlaps with my son's birthday. I wanted to go last year, and I think it also overlapped with my son's birthday. Maybe the year ... This is 2018, so maybe 2016? But I'm not actually 100% sure. That's a really good question. It's been a while.

Nuno Maduro: Anyway, did you enjoy it?

Matt Stauffer: Oh, Laracon? Oh, it was amazing. Amsterdam is beautiful. Shawn knows how to throw ... Shawn and company, they know how to throw a really incredible conference, and I got to meet so many people that I'd known just over Twitter. Laracon EU was actually the first Laracon I ever spoke at, so my first conference I ever spoke at was PeersConf in the US, and then soon after that, Shawn gave me a spot being the opening talk at Laracon EU, even though I had never spoken at a Laracon before.

Nuno Maduro: Oh, you are lucky.

Matt Stauffer: I have a lot of love for Laracon EU, and every year that I miss it is a sad year for me.

Nuno Maduro: Yeah. Amsterdam is beautiful.

Matt Stauffer: Oh my gosh. Amsterdam is amazing.

Nuno Maduro: Anyway, year. Laracon EU is moving next year.

Matt Stauffer: Is it?

Nuno Maduro: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: That makes me kind of sad, because I love Amsterdam, but I'm sure it's a good thing so that I can kind of try a new place. Have they said where yet?

Nuno Maduro: Yes. It's a nice opportunity to visit another places in Europe. No. I think Shawn have made a poll on Twitter or something like that.

Matt Stauffer: Oh, okay.

Nuno Maduro: He is eventually deciding another place to go.

Matt Stauffer: Very, very cool. Yeah. I have very little interaction on Twitter these days. I'm hoping that will change soon enough.

All right. Since we're getting long on time, I want to see, are there any things that you wanted to have the opportunity to talk to people about, to share about, that you wanted to make sure we covered today?

Nuno Maduro: Yeah. Basically, I'm working on the new package that I think I told in the beginning of the episode, called Larvel Code Analyze. That package, we're probably gonna have another name, but the whole point of it is actually to catch bugs and mistakes on your code, and I think it will be a really kicker for Larvel, because you can integrate that on your continuous integration, for example. It returns, like the exit code will be green or red if you have mistakes or not. I think the package will be really, really great, and I can't wait to realize it.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. I'm very excited. I saw you Tweeting about it a little bit, and I got excited. I mean, anything that allows us to have less problems in our code is great, but this almost seems like it comes for free.

Nuno Maduro: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: Because it's not even like writing test. It's just static analysis, and so-

Nuno Maduro: Exactly.

Matt Stauffer: I'm very, very excited to see what you do with that, and I'll make sure to put show links.

Nuno Maduro: Yeah. It goes even deeper than PHPStorm, for example. People used to compare that with PHPStorm, because PHPStorm itself have some static analysis, but it is not even compared. It will show up every single mistake on your code. It's just great.

Matt Stauffer: Very cool. I'm very, very excited to see it. If people ... Oh, go ahead. Go ahead.

Nuno Maduro: I have a suggestion, actually. I would like to ask you when you will be the guy on this side? Because I think-

Matt Stauffer: Oh, when am I gonna get interviewed?

Nuno Maduro: Yeah, because I think since the beginning of this season, or actually all seasons, you never got to have the opportunity of being interviewed, so we don't know as much of your backstory. I think it's a good suggestion, no?

Matt Stauffer: Well, thank you. A few people have asked that. I think the biggest question is, I just gotta figure out who's willing to do it. I mean, I've said for a long time that I think that Adam is one of my favorite podcasters of all time. I might have to just kind of see if I can kind of twist his arm into doing that for me one day. Thank you for bringing it up. I will be in the hot seat one day. That's a good reminder.

Is there anything else you want to talk about today, or do you feel like we covered most of what's on your brain right now?

Nuno Maduro: Yeah. I think we covered the most.

Matt Stauffer: This was a ton of fun. I really appreciate you spending some time to talk to me about your packages, and also about your story a little bit. You said you didn't have an interesting story, but I think that if everybody tells the same story, it would get boring, honestly. I mean, if I just interviewed 20 people and every single one of them said, "I got a computer at 13 that I, blah blah ..." Even Neil's story, which was one of the most interesting ones I've ever heard, if everybody said that same story, it would be boring. I love it. I love hearing different ways about people, and I mean, I don't know a lot of people who are programming today who had a computer at five. I think that's pretty fascinating.

Matt Stauffer:
All right, welcome back to the Laravel podcast, season three. This is the version of the Laravel podcast where we get to know less about tech and more about the people behind the tech, and today my guest is none other than Adam Wathan who has taught us all about testing, collections, view, components and many other things. One of things I love about Adam is that he's never satisfied with what's happening around him and he's always taking in stuff from other places, and we'll talk about this more probably later in the podcast, but when I describe Adam to other people, I say he's the guy who basically finds what's good everywhere else and brings it to us in the Laravel world. So if you haven't heard of Adam, my mind is blown. You should go consume everything he's ever made; it's all gold. I will say to some of y'all that his name is pronounced Wa-than, right? That's right?

Adam Wathan:
Yeah, you got it.

Matt Stauffer:
Wa-than. Not Way-thin, not Way-than. I'm trying to think about other things I've heard, but Adam Wathan. So Adam, say hi to the people, and the first question I always ask everybody is when you meet somebody in the grocery store how do you introduce yourself? How do you tell them what you do?

Adam Wathan:
Cool. Yeah, so thanks for having me on. I'm Adam. I usually explain ... It depends on what people ask, because some people ask like what do you do? I say I'm a software developer, although I don't actually get paid to write code, I get paid to teach people about code. So I either describe myself as a software developer who creates courses and e-books and training products for other software developers who are looking to kind of level up. So that's kind of the shortest version that I try and give to people that usually is enough that they kind of either are interested in it and ask me more questions or aren't interested and don't want to hear anymore.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, so I'm already going to cheat a little because I want to ask one little thing about your motivation that I've been curious about for a while and hopefully they'll still come out when we talk about your background but, you know, you're really smart guy, you learn a lot of stuff, but you're also a teacher and you also have like marketing kind of like sensibility, and you just gave an elevator pitch that would make someone who doesn't even understand programming want to go sign up for your product and I don't think that that's really common for a lot of us to know how to talk about it that well, so ... And if this is going to come out later that's cool, but do you have a sense for where your ability to kind of understand how to market something and how to ... And you talk a lot about how to do it in a non-skeezy way, but where did that come from? Is that something you had to work on, or do you feel like you've got some experience that's kind of taught you that?

Adam Wathan:
That's a good question and I don't think I have a great answer for it. I think I've always just really liked creating things that I was proud of and putting them out into the world with enthusiasm and I think that's been kind of like the simplest version of how I have always tried to share what I've been working on and then I think with the marketing stuff too, I guess I just care just as much about the quality of that as I do about everything I do. I just really like to make everything I do as good as I possibly can and that comes down to even things like, you know, landing pages and how things look on stuff like that. To me, the marketing is a product too and I want it to be good and I want to be proud of it, so it's just something that I just put a lot of effort into I guess the same way I would with something else.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I mean, I tell this story to people all the time, but when you first joined Tighten, one of the things we were talking about was working on some open source projects together, and we immediately found a conflict in our ways of working where I was like, so what I do with this thing Symposium is I figure out a feature and I spit out the feature as fast as possible and then I move on to the next feature, and you're like what I do is I try to figure out exactly the best way to do this feature and I ponder on it and I make plans and I make diagrams and I get it exactly right so people will really get their needs met and then and only then do I actually build out a feature.

Matt Stauffer:
And we kind of had this like little head butt moment, and I think that I've kind of ... I would say I've shifted to your way of thinking, but I've been influenced by it a lot. Do you have a sense for where your kind of desire for excellence ... I think you were just talking about like where that comes from, is that just a personality trait? Is that something from your family, and what's that ... Where does that come from?

Adam Wathan:
I think it's just a personality trait. I've been like that with basically everything that I've ever been interested in my entire life. Like I would sit and play guitar and play the exact same seven notes for four hours straight until I played them perfectly, you know what I mean? So I think I just get a little bit obsessive over the sorts of things that I get interested in.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I just want to get really good at it. All right, well, I'm sure we'll dip into the stuff a little bit more, but I do want to make sure that I actually have the space for your back story. So the second question I always ask everybody is, where was it that you ... Or what was the context in which you first had interactions with a computer? How old were you and kind of what was your interaction like at that point?

Adam Wathan:
Yeah, so I have sort of conflicting memories for a lot of some of the stuff. Not necessarily conflicting, but sometimes I have a hard time figuring out like what the timeline was, but some of my earliest memories of working with computers, probably the earliest one that I can think of. is when I was in grade ... It must have been probably grade two, maybe grade three, but I had this librarian at my school who worked with like some of the gifted kids to do little projects and stuff and me and him were working on the super old Mac that we had at the ... It was new at the time I'm sure, right, but like my memory of it's like the old school Mac where everything's black and white and stuff like that. Using hypercard to make this little project we went around and it was actually pretty cool.

Adam Wathan:
We got to like drive around the neighborhood and I got to like ask questions like different business owners about things and we put together this like little presentation in hypercard, and that's probably like my earliest memory of working with a computer and we got a computer in my family when I was pretty young too, probably grade four or grade five. It was just like kind of your standard ... It was like an Acer or Compaq PC or something with four megs of RAM and, you know, I can't even think, a 500 megabyte hard drive, and we got-

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, a 486 or something like that.

Adam Wathan:
Like our internet a couple years later. Yeah, it was a 486 and I used to dick around on that, you know, looking up game tutorials for my Sega Genesis at GameFacts.com and stuff like that and-

Matt Stauffer:
What's the best game on the Genesis? What's your favorite, do you remember?

Adam Wathan:
Favorite Genesis game. I used to play the hockey games a lot. That was probably what I got-

Matt Stauffer:
You're so Canadian.

Adam Wathan:
The most fun out of. The funny thing is like I'm not super into hockey, but those were just the most fun like multiplayer games that you could play. That and like Mortal Combat and Street Fighter.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, of course.

Adam Wathan:
And all the classics. I didn't do much of the single player stuff, just mostly hanging out with friends and playing.

Matt Stauffer:
No Sonic and Knuckles and things like that?

Adam Wathan:
I did play Sonic, but I wouldn't say like I have, you know, nostalgic memories about how much I loved that game or whatever. It was a fun game but, yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I feel like not a lot of people have the same level of memories of Sonic as they did at Mario. I just never quite connected in the same way.

Adam Wathan:
No, Mario definitely has a more special place in people's hearts, I think.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, you actually got into this a little bit, but my next question is going to be kind of what was your first exposure to the internet? So was that primarily it at least at the start?

Adam Wathan:
I'm not sure if it would have been at school or at home, but yeah, it would have been most of the time that I spent on the internet would have been at my home desktop computer on our 14.4 connections we used to use.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. So when you were in middle school and high school, what do you think you wanted to do with your life? Did you know?

Adam Wathan:
I had some conflicting thoughts, so at one point when I was a kid I wanted to be a cartoonist, that was my dream actually.

Matt Stauffer:
I had no idea.

Adam Wathan:
I used to draw all the time and I used to like ... You know how you'd have like the book fairs at school, I don't know if you had those in the States.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah yeah, Scholastic. We had them here.

Adam Wathan:
The Scholastic Book Fairs.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
I'd always be ordering like the how to draw this or the how to draw that books and I never got really good at it, but it was fun and then eventually I got into like playing guitar and stuff like that and I wanted to be like an audio engineer, but I also wanted to be a programmer and I really liked my programming classes in high school, so I ended up going to university for computer science, but I also considered going to college for music industry arts, which is a program that actually Steve Schoger, who some people might know actually did go to at the college that I used to go to.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh, he did?

Adam Wathan:
But I decided against it because it just didn't seem like a profitable career path, so I eventually chose computer science.

Matt Stauffer:
So you had programming classes in high school. Was this Java or C++ or what kind of stuff were you guys doing there?

Adam Wathan:
Let me think. So I think we ... I don't think we had computer programming classes 'till like grade 10 and we did a lot of like Pascal and we did C, and we did Java and then we have a web one which was later, which was kind of weird because the Java stuff was ... Even the Java stuff isn't ... When I think back to the fact that we did Java in high school, I don't remember doing any of the stuff that I know about Java now. Like I didn't know what object oriented programming was when I came out of high school, even though Java is an object oriented language. We just would write procedural code in like our main-

Matt Stauffer:
Good job, yeah.

Adam Wathan:
Java file or whatever, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
And stuff like that, but yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
What made you choose those classes?

Adam Wathan:
I think I just thought it was really fun to be able to make the computer do stuff.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
So I remember like one of my earliest memories of programming actually is when I was a kid I was like super obsessed with pro wrestling, that was like my thing. And I used to download all these like wrestling simulators so you could like ... It's so funny because they weren't ... they're not like games, right? They're like you create characters, you choose their move sets, you give them the statistics and stuff and then you like run simulations and it would spit out like texts, like this guy punched this guy, then this guy powerbombs this guy-

Matt Stauffer:
Right, and you're not actually controlling what they did, right?

Adam Wathan:
As well as like, you know, the statistics and attributes of the different wrestlers. There's a couple different programs that you could use to do that and I was always looking for different ones to test them out, and then one day I stumbled upon a tutorial online that was like make your own wrestling simulator in QBasic.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh, nice. QBasic, yes.

Adam Wathan:
And I was like, okay. And that was my first exposure to QBasic. I followed the tutorial and got everything set up and I didn't know how to like do random stuff or anything like that, so I never got very far with it. It was all just very like ... It was not like conditional logic or anything, you would just do this, this, this.

Matt Stauffer:
It just takes input-

Adam Wathan:
I couldn't figure out how to make it do exactly what the other things are doing, but I could make the computer do stuff, and that kind of got me interested in the whole QBasic programming stuff and then I just started looking into more like QBasic tutorials and finding out stuff that you could do, and I remember getting really into ... I don't think I'll ever remember the actual name of it. I found a site that I think might have been it, which is Pete's QBasic tutorials, which I don't know if that was the site for sure, but some of the content looked really familiar, but it had lots of tutorials on like making like tile scrolling RPG engines in QBasic and stuff and-

Matt Stauffer:
What?

Adam Wathan:
Where you could create like little sprite characters and you'd make these like 20 pixel by 20 pixel squares and lay them all out and make it scroll as you use the keyboard and stuff like that. So one summer I had this dream of making an RPG, which of course never even remotely happened, but I had a lot of fun just hacking around on the computer getting it to render this stuff and do stuff like that. So I think that's where I really got excited about programming because I don't know if I have a specific passion for programming more than anything else, but it was just like a really perfect kind of platform for just doing creative things, you know what I mean, and making stuff. It's the most like powerful tool for just like making interesting things that I know of so far, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
So I think that's what kind of got me into that. So I did a bunch of QBasic stuff messing around with that and eventually I started making my own little websites on Geocities an Angelfire and stuff like that and yeah, I've kind of been doing that ever since, so.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I was thinking about how creation was definitely a trend for you. I mean between music creation, you know, as a guitarist and music production, you know, and the art and everything like this is it's wanting to make things happen and figure out what the tools are, so it's interesting hearing you say, you know, it's the most powerful tool that you can use for that.

Adam Wathan:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Do you ever draw still?

Adam Wathan:
No, not at all.

Matt Stauffer:
Do you have any of your old drawings anywhere?

Adam Wathan:
I might. My parents just sold their house and gave me a big box of like crap lying around that was mine.

Matt Stauffer:
You got to find something, man.

Adam Wathan:
I think there's a couple sketchbooks in there so I should maybe-

Matt Stauffer:
That would be amazing.

Adam Wathan:
Dig through those.

Matt Stauffer:
Please. Okay, so you went off to school for computer science and did you have a sense ... Did you have any shifts during school with what kind of aspect of CS that you were interested in or if ... And yes or no, what did you think you were going to do afterwards?

Adam Wathan:
Yeah, so I actually only went to the university for a single semester, so I did the first semester a bunch of the classes I did find fun like the ones that were direct programming, so we had like a C class where we'd basically get these weekly kind of projects that we have to work on where just have to go through a bunch of problems to get the computer to do that stuff, and that was the stuff that I was really interested in and really excited about, but then we also had classes that weren't as interesting, like digital fundamentals and stuff related to more like computer engineering sides of stuff which is interesting, but it didn't get me excited and want to work on it.

Adam Wathan:
That stuff was like a chore, and at the time I was also playing in a band and we ... That was all I wanted to do. Like we were playing shows and recording demos and stuff like that, so the computer stuff was not really a big focus for me at the time and I was commuting to school which was about a 45 minute drive away and living at home, so I didn't really get like embedded into the sort of university community that was there.

Adam Wathan:
So I didn't really like make any friends or meet anyone, I was only there for classes and that was it. So it was really hard for me to sort of, you know, become a university student. That was like this thing on the side I felt like for rest of my life, where my friends were and my hobbies were and stuff like that, so I only stuck with that for a single semester and then dropped out to just basically work full time while I reconsidered what I wanted to do, because it just ... I just wasn't enjoying university and I don't think it was the programming that I wasn't enjoying, it was just the educational side of it and having to get pulled away from the things that I was actually excited about to work on that. So I don't remember what the original question was, but that's kind of that story.

Matt Stauffer:
Well, no, and that's actually perfect and before I move on from that, I want to ask one question which is, was the distinction between doing versus learning abstract theory, was it about how concrete something was that was the difference between what you did and didn't like, or did I kind of miss that a little bit?

Adam Wathan:
No, I think that's true. I think the other thing is there's just a lot of classes that you have to take in university that aren't as ... they're not all really like cohesive, you know what I mean? I don't know what the system is like in the U.S., but in Canada we have university and college, which I think is kind of like college and community college in the U.S.

Matt Stauffer:
I think so, yeah.

Adam Wathan:
But the way that you pick your classes and stuff a lot of it is you have to go into the school and you have to go and sign up for different classes and you have different requirements, and you have to get credits and different things, but a lot of it is kind of up to you and they don't really put together like a cohesive curriculum. So I had to have X Math credits, X Elective credits, so I took like this history of music class, which is the only class I've ever failed in school in my entire life.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh, my God.

Adam Wathan:
And you would think that I ... Just because it's so damn boring, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
And I just like couldn't get into it at all. But everything was just kind of disconnected. There was like some math over here, some physics over here, and because at the early stages of things it's kind of like when you're in like first year of high school or something, they're just trying to teach you all these fundamental concepts-

Matt Stauffer:
Basics, yeah.

Adam Wathan:
Without kind of tying them back to the goal they you're trying to get into and I ended up going back to college years later which we can talk about maybe a little bit later, where the curriculum was much more cohesive and everything is sort of designed to teach you to be a programmer, and I really liked that experience. So yeah, I think it is just the fact that there was only one class that I actually liked, which was the programming class and everything else just felt like high school all over again, you know.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah. No, I totally hear that. I mean there's a lot of conversations happening these days and I'll wait to go into them until we talk more about your later school experience, but around trade school versus university, versus whatever else and what are the pros and cons of each and I think a lot of it ... You know, one of the things I've come down to recently is that I've always been a pro university person with lots of caveats, and one of them is just like the school you're at really makes a big difference, and the classes you take and the professors you have. You know, there's a lot of factors that can give you a very, very, very, varied experience, even in the same type of program in the same type of school. So where did you go from there? You said you kind of were reconsidering your working full time, you were recording with your band and were you doing any touring at that point, too?

Adam Wathan:
No, we never got successful enough to do anything interesting like that. I was local shows and stuff, but yeah, so I was just working like crappy factory jobs basically. I'm trying to think what was the first job that I got after I left university. I have to try and reconstruct a time line, but the one I remember most specifically was working for a company where I was basically just in a factory building really high-end like antique looking stoves.

Adam Wathan:
So I did that for like a year while I still played in bands and did stuff like that and then eventually a friend of mine was working up in the Alberta oil sands like way up north and I would have all these construction projects to extract all the oil out of the sand and sell it of all over the world, and his dad actually ran the site up there so he had a lot of pull and one day he just called me and he was like, "Hey, do you want a job up here?" And I was like, "Sure." He's like, "Someone's going to call you tomorrow and offer you a job." And I didn't know-

Matt Stauffer:
That's awesome.

Adam Wathan:
What it's going to be. Like I had never seen the job description or anything, but this is just this guy's kind of style and so ... Yeah, I ended up working up there for two years doing like basically data entry stuff for the materials team, so I worked in an office in the frigid cold in Fort McMurray where it's like minus 50 degrees Celsius in the winters.

Matt Stauffer:
Holy crap!

Adam Wathan:
Our offices are these little portable trailers on the construction site and I was just there basically in Excel reconciling like purchase orders and invoices and making sure that, you know, we received the materials that we had paid for and that all this ... Just a bunch of really kind of monotonous data entry stuff, but for being like a 20 year old kid it paid really well and I did that for like two years until kind of that whole industry and economy started to suffer a little bit more because gas prices and oil prices dropped and they did a bunch of big layoffs which was ... So I got laid off, which was like a blessing in disguise really because I know a lot of people that basically just stayed up there forever because you can never get paid the same thing to come home. And I would work up there for 14 days straight, 10 hours a day and then they would fly you back to where you lived for seven days off. So I was constantly flying back and forth. which just made it really hard to have like a normal life, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
So yeah, I got laid off from that, came home, decided I would use that chance to try and get into like the recording stuff, because I was getting into recording a lot when I was up there and doing it when I was coming home just as kind of a hobby, but I thought why don't I try and like find some bands and record and like mix EPs for them and stuff. So I did that for like a year, which is a dumb industry to get into because bands don't have money, especially local bands, so you can't make a lot of money doing that, but what I found is while I was doing that I was using this tool called Reaper, which I still use out of my podcast and stuff like that, and I found that there was a bunch of features that I wished it had that it didn't have, and it was created by the guy who created Winamp originally, and it's like a very hacker friendly tool, so it lets you like extend it with Python or C++ or Lua now as well, so you can write all these sorts of like plugins and extensions for it and the API that they give you to do that stuff is like very powerful, you can access basically everything in the tool and write your own menu options and dialog boxes and all sorts of features and stuff.

Adam Wathan:
So I started getting into like hacking around with that doing really simple things and then one of the guys in the IRC chat for the software, kind of like this elite group of people who are like hacking on stuff there. I made this thing using Python and he was like, "You should port this to C++ so we can include it in this big extension that they maintain." and I was like, "I'd love to do that, I just don't have any idea how." and he's like "Well, okay, I'll help you." So for the next little while he would kind of like ... He kind of put together like a playground in this extension source code for me to like write my features in and help me figure out how to get XCode compiling it and all this different stuff, and that's when I kind of really like reignited my excitement and passion for programming because I was just having so much fun adding features to this tool and making it easier for me to do my work to the point where I was having way more fun adding features to the tool than I was actually using the tool to record bands.

Adam Wathan:
And I didn't even get back into web development or anything at that point. I hadn't made a website since like high school. So that's when I decided you know what, I think I'm going to go back to college and do this programming thing again, but I decided to do college and study university specifically because I knew like what I didn't like about university and I wanted to do something that was a lot more practical and focused on making you into a programmer than it was, you know, educating you about computer science.

Matt Stauffer:
So I had been meaning to ask and that's helpful. Are you familiar with the concept of a trade school?

Adam Wathan:
Yeah, like where you would go to learn to become like an electrician or something like that?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's not the same thing, right? You're more talking about it's a school, but it's more like single focus sort of like our community colleges, but I was wondering whether colleges like a little bit different than communities or if it's just-

Adam Wathan:
Yeah, I'm not sure. So the college I went to is Conestoga College. I'm going to pull up the website now, but basically here college programs are usually two-year programs and you get a diploma, and university are four years and you get a degree, that's kind of the fundamental difference. So I'm going to try and pull up like the actual program that I did here so I can kind of talk a little bit about the actual curriculum because I think it's kind of interesting.

Matt Stauffer:
While you do that, this is definitely similar to community college. It literally even in the Google preview says your community ... Ontario Community College and this is definitely not trade school, definitely community college, if that makes sense.

Adam Wathan:
Yeah, so I did the software engineering program there, and not the computer programmer course, which I got kind of turned on to that by asking around to friends who had gone to the school to kind of figure out like, you know, what are you supposed to do, but if you look at the actual program courses here we can maybe like link to this and then show it to people that are interested, but like in the first year we had classes like software engineering fundamentals, operating system fundamentals, C, C++ programming, computer security, object oriented programming, some of this has changed, but then year two we did like web design and development, relational databases, Windows and mobile programming, microprocessors and embedded systems, software quality, so like in school we learned about automated testing, which is pretty cool.

Matt Stauffer:
Nice.

Adam Wathan:
You never learn that in university. Advanced computer security, mobile application and development. Yeah, so it was just like all programming. Every class was programming, but it was just focused around some different kind of element of it using different technologies and stuff like that. So the nice thing about that is that college is really close to my house and unlike university where the schedule it's like really weird, sometimes I'd go to a three-hour lecture and then have seven hours off then have to go back in the night for a one-hour class. Like this is structured so much similar to high school, you know what I mean?

Adam Wathan:
Like you'd get there in the morning, you'd leave in the afternoon, so you're there for a long period of time, you get to like meet people, you get put on projects with people, and I really got into what I was doing there in terms of like I made a lot of friends, you know, that kind of became like my focus which was I think what made me not stick it out in university. It was just like such a side project, whereas I was able to really sort of like embed myself into what we're doing in this program, so-

Matt Stauffer:
That's really interesting.

Adam Wathan:
Yeah, that went really for me. So I did that for two years. It's a three-year program, but the way they do it is kind of weird. They have like three years with co-op, I don't know if people use that term in the U.S. It's kind of an internship-

Matt Stauffer:
I don't think so.

Adam Wathan:
Like paid internship.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh, yeah.

Adam Wathan:
So if they do like two years of schooling and then for 18 months you go out into the workforce. There was like four work terms across those 18 months I think, something like that. And some people do them all the same company, some people do four different ones, some people split up however, but you get paid to do that, which is pretty cool like 18 bucks an hour or more depending on who the employer is, and then once you're done that kind of co-op internship stuff, you go back and do your third year of schooling and then you get your diploma and then you're done.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh, cool.

Adam Wathan:
So I just did the first two years, and then I did my co-op at Vehikl who were called Chrome Media at the time, and I think I was like the only person to apply for that job because everyone else was trying to get a job at Desire2Learn which is a company that makes like education student management software, and it's all C# and Windows stuff and that's what they teach us in school so that's what everyone was excited about and they were kind of like the cool, hip company in the area, but I was like the only kid in my class that used a Mac, so doing the Windows stuff was painful for me. I had to like boot up a VM and do stuff like that, so even with all our projects I would do in school I was always trying to find technologies that I could work with easier on my Mac.

Adam Wathan:
Because we had a lot of like web based projects, even though we didn't have a lot of web specific courses, but in the later years we'd have like a project that was a two-month project and you could choose the technology, which is cool, so some people did C#, some people did, whatever. I chose PHP because that was the only programming language I knew of that you could do dynamic stuff on the server. Like at the time I didn't know that oh, you can use Ruby to do that or Java or any of these other languages, I just knew from like trying to create PHP scripts I could accept form submissions when I was 16 years old that like PHP was the language that you do ... I used to do stuff on the server, so I started looking into, you know, tools for PHP that could compare with like ASP or C#.

Matt Stauffer:
Like MVC. Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
That like framework and I found my code igniter and stuff like that and so we started messing around with those sorts of things, and I was lucky enough to find a handful of people that wanted to work on those technologies with me instead of doing the C# stuff and they were all pretty bright people, so we did a bunch of projects using that stuff and then when it came time to look for co-op opportunities I applied to Desire To Learn and they never got back to me, which is great because if they had and I had gotten a job there I'd probably still be a C# developer now.

Adam Wathan:
Instead I saw this tiny, little company that was only three people at the time that was doing like Magento sites and some custom app development in PHP, and I was like you know what, I'll apply for that and I ended up being like the only person in my class who applied there and that ended up being like the best way it could have ever possibly worked out because I met some really cool, talented people there that really helped me get my career to where it is now and encouraged me to speak at user groups and get involved in open source and stuff like that.

Matt Stauffer:
That's awesome.

Adam Wathan:
So after I went and worked there I did my whole kind of internship co-op stuff there and I just never went back to school because I had a mortgage and stuff like that. I was like 26 at the time or 25, 26, and I couldn't really afford to like not get paid for another year or going back to school and the whole point of going to school was to be able to get a job. and now I had a job and even if I wanted to leave there, well, I had a job doing programming for a living on my resume now so it didn't really matter, you know what I mean?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
So I got what I needed out of it and then kind of got into the workforce doing PHP stuff and actually like even when I started there, that's when I really got seriously into Laravel stuff. We actually started using Laravel 4 on a client project before it was officially released when it was still like in a beta, which is cool, so I was getting paid to write Laravel code on my very first programming job.

Matt Stauffer:
Which is amazing.

Adam Wathan:
Pretty neat.

Matt Stauffer:
That's very cool. And who are the three? It was Chris and Grant and who was the third person, do you remember?

Adam Wathan:
Chris, Grant and Caryn, who is like a ... She's a product designer.

Matt Stauffer:
Product designer, yeah.

Adam Wathan:
A UX person there.

Matt Stauffer:
I didn't know she was employee number one.

Adam Wathan:
I don't think she was employee number one. They kind of went through a couple different iterations of the company doing different stuff-

Matt Stauffer:
Got it. Okay.

Adam Wathan:
Over time, but when I got there it was the three of them and they kind of had their thing figured out.

Matt Stauffer:
Very cool. All right, so the story from there you did at Vehikl ... So when did you start speaking? Was it the Laracon EU testing talk? Was that your first kind of big conference, or what was your speaking journey like?

Adam Wathan:
So the first talk that I ever gave was like an intro to Laravel talk at a Meetup that we created so that I could give that talk basically like the vehicle we created like the Kitchener-Waterloo Laravel Meetup which only survived like a few Meetups because we also had this like Guelph PHP user group which half the time we were doing Kitchener anyways and that eventually just became like oh, we'll just do everything there because we'd meet up once a month there. But yeah, so I gave a talk at that user group to about like 30 people or something, which was my first time doing any speaking like that, and I may have done another talk after that to like a local Meetup, but yeah, the first conference talk I think was the community day at Laracon EU 2015 or maybe '14, yeah, and I did the talk-

Matt Stauffer:
I remember it, but I don't remember the year so, yeah.

Adam Wathan:
Yeah, I can't remember what the talk was called, TDD the good parts, I think, and then after that I think I gave a talk at True North PHP in Toronto at Chris Hartjes and Peter Meth's conference and from there I just kind of got into it more and more. Once you kind of have one conference under your belt, it's a lot easier to get into the other ones, especially if you make the effort to get them filmed and post them online and be able to use that stuff to help show people hey, I can actually do this and it'll be fun. I'm a grown up I can do a good job.

Matt Stauffer:
Cool. So at some point you were using Laravel, and you became more aware of some of the world's around there. You were looking into things in Rails, you were talking about Ruby some. What was that journey like from Laravel being the thing that you were spending all your time in, to kind of expanding your exposure to the rest of the web world, I guess.

Adam Wathan:
I can't say ... I can't think of a specific ... I can't remember exactly how I heard about some of these other things, because like I said, I only remember being in college and being like well, PHP is what I use on a server. I didn't even know Rails existed. Like in some ways, in a lot of ways I wish I had known, because I probably would have never become a Laravel programmer. Not because I don't have ... I have anything against Laravel, but throughout the years it's become pretty clear that philosophically I'm much more aligned with the way people think in kind of the Ruby world, right?

Adam Wathan:
So I was already kind of like deep into Laravel stuff and feeling like pretty fast and productive with it and I'm sure all I was doing was poking around the internet looking for tutorials, reading things about how to do this and that and somewhere in there someone said similar to how this works in Rails blah, blah, you know what I mean? Like eventually you just kind of like start hearing about these things.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Start hearing it, yeah.

Adam Wathan:
And the Laravel community was a lot less mature than it is now at that point, so a lot of the really good content that was out there was focused on Rails. Like Rails had a big head start on a lot of what we're doing in the Laravel world. Rails came out in like 2004 I think originally. And there's blog posts written in like 2008, 2009 that are still really useful blog posts for people writing Laravel stuff now, so it was actually really interesting for me to discover that kind of whole world because at the time this was like 2013, 2014 when I was learning Laravel originally. Maybe ... Yeah, probably 2013, there was like eight years worth of high quality Rails content out there. So if I could just figure out-

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, sitting out there already.

Adam Wathan:
How to translate the syntax from Ruby to PHP, you know, there was all this content out there that could make me a better Laravel developer, basically. So I got really, really deep into all that stuff and that's when I discovered companies like Thoughtbot that had done tons of blogging and written books and put together video tutorials or Gary Bernhardt's Destroy All Software, which is all Rails stuff. There was just so much good stuff out there and that's where I basically focused all my learning at that point was taking everything that people had already ... Like I make this joke a lot of the time that any time like someone runs into a problem with Laravel, like a design decision where you're like okay, well, what's the best way to do this in Laravel, take the current year subtract four years, include that in your search query and look for how to do that in Rails and there will be like 100 quality blog posts out there.

Adam Wathan:
So yeah, I got really into just kind of researching what people were doing in these other ecosystems and finding out what made sense to try to port back and apply to what we were doing in PHP stuff and yeah, that's kind of been like my shtick, I guess. I'm always looking outside my existing community to see if ... I think of myself as like Christopher Columbus like going across the sea to the foreign lands and bringing back treasures for people.

Matt Stauffer:
Nice. Yeah, so let's see. So you worked at Vehikl for a while and do you know how big Vehikl was when you left?

Adam Wathan:
So it was still actually just the four of us-

Matt Stauffer:
Oh, yeah? Okay.

Adam Wathan:
When I left, which was kind of like my motivation for leaving. I still was really enjoying the work that I was doing there, but I had this like nagging feeling that I was missing out on the ability to grow faster by not being part of a bigger team where there was more ... Not more experienced developers like developers with more experience, but just more developers-

Matt Stauffer:
More people, yeah, yeah.

Adam Wathan:
That were experienced-

Matt Stauffer:
With different experiences, yeah.

Adam Wathan:
To learn from, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
And that was kind of stressing me out at the time, so I ended up leaving to go work for a company that did Rails consulting, but when I got there I got dumped onto a project doing C# and Angular, so I only stayed there for like three months because I want to blow my brains out ,and I soon ... Like within the first week of working I was like I can't believe I left my other job, this sucks so bad. And then after being there for a couple months Tighten, this company out of Chicago that does some Laravel stuff, I don't know, people might have heard of them, posted a job posting on the old Laravel job site and I applied for that and ended up going to work there for a while.

Matt Stauffer:
It's so weird because I've been trying to figure out how to ask you questions about that time, and it's really tough. I don't know how, but maybe I'll just try and throw a broad one at you and see if that goes somewhere. What was the area you grew in the most while you're working at Tighten? I think that may be a question to start with.

Adam Wathan:
That's a hard one. I can't think exactly what ... I think the biggest changes for me are the things that I had to figure out the most was like the remote working thing. That was like a new thing for me and figuring out how to ask for help with things and get stuff done and get help from people in a way where like I'm just so used to ... I was just so used to working in an office where if you're frustrated with a problem, like the people sitting around you can tell, you know what I mean?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adam Wathan:
And that's not as easy in a remote company, so you have to figure out ways to manage that sort of thing, especially when people are not always like available at the same time because everyone's kind of working ... Like even though you have kind of standard-ish hours, there's still a lot of a synchronicity to it, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.

Adam Wathan:
Everyone has different calendars with different things going on, which is very different than being in an office. Yeah, people have stuff scheduled and calls and stuff, but you can like see when someone is available. So figuring that out was probably ... That was probably the biggest change and area for me to kind of figure out how to work that way, and yeah, it was good though. I think the remote working set up is the way to do it, as long as you can make sure people are able to communicate when they need to communicate and feel ... You have to be more deliberate about asking for help, which can be hard, you know what I mean?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
If you can just be frustrated and people can tell and people offer to help, that's one thing, but sometimes it's like you feel like you have to ask for help every 15 minutes with something, especially when you're starting, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
And that could be like ... It's like a degree of shame or something like associated with that. That's hard to get over.

Matt Stauffer:
We've been working ... That's probably been the biggest barrier with bringing on juniors is that the combination of junior, plus remote, it's really an extra level of shame.

Adam Wathan:
Plus new job, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
Which is hard for even for like an experienced person, yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
New job, remote, new tech, I don't know what I'm doing, everybody else here has got it and I'm asking for questions every 15 minutes, I feel like I'm bothering people.

Adam Wathan:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
That's definitely tough.

Adam Wathan:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
So this is the last question I'll ask about your time at Tighten, but one of the things that was really impactful from our perspective was that you had a lot of thoughts about how a company should be run and a lot of them came from watching Base Camp and and Thoughtbot, and thinking about concepts that you've talked about in the podcasts and some of the times I've talked with you about on podcasts of things like no estimates and stuff like that, where there's a certain way of thinking, and I think that Dan and I say often that your time at Tighten was really impactful in terms of just kind of like sharing those things with us, but it wasn't always just as easy as Adam comes in and teaches something.

Matt Stauffer:
Often it happened in the context of, you know, there was a ... Not necessarily there was a conflict, but there was sort of like well, why is it not happening this way and we'd be like, "Oh well, I don't know. We'll figure that out." So I was wondering during your time at Tighten, do you feel like you learned anything about what you wanted to kind of do when you grew up kind of vibe in terms of teaching, or were there things that you learned about how you think software should be written or something that happened in the context of those learning moments and those conflicts and everything that we had during those times?

Adam Wathan:
Yeah, I'm try to think if there's anything specific I can take away as like a learning ...

Matt Stauffer:
And if not, no worries, I'll just edit out the question.

Adam Wathan:
Yeah, I think like ... I mean, what I like working on the most at Tighten was being able to create projects for companies, build stuff for other people. I think if anything, what I maybe took away is that ... What's the best way to say this? I like having control I guess of like my own destiny in that sense because working with companies to build new projects for them there's like this of course this whole layer of stuff that comes with that that isn't there when you're just building something for yourself of course, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
And it can be a real challenge sometimes to get people on board with building something in a way that is in their best interests, even though they might not understand why or agree why, and that's just like a whole thing that you have to figure out how to navigate that can just get in the way of what you want to do which is just like creating the best thing for solving a problem for them, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
So I think being able to get into what I'm doing now where I get to like create training stuff and stuff like that has been a nice change in that sense, because it lets me focus on just doing ... Creating the thing that I want to create. But yeah, like you said, like I think a lot of the reason that I cared so much at Tighten and everywhere I worked about how to try and run these projects successfully is for that same reason because I just want to make the great project, you know what I mean?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
And I think everyone is on the same page there, right? Like you want to figure out a way to navigate the other stuff and minimize it so that you can just focus on doing the work, but because I just care so much about doing the work and that's what I want to do, that it kind of pulls me down this path of figuring out like okay, what is stopping us from being able to just do the work and what ideas are out there in the world that people have that can help us focus on-

Matt Stauffer:
Help us, yeah.

Adam Wathan:
Just doing the work for people. So I don't know if that really answers your question in terms of I guess like a specific kind of learnings or take aways, but in terms of, you know, that sort of project management side of things, I think that's sort of like where my motivations at least come from to care about that stuff.

Matt Stauffer:
Well, it's funny because you say everyone feels that way and of course everyone, you know, hopefully wants to really do a good job for the client, but it also reflects a little bit back on what we were talking about earlier about you love doing things to the best they can possibly be done and it's not just your things, you know, it's also other people's things. Like every project you have a hand in, you want it to be the best possible thing, and if there's stuff getting in the way of that, well, then that's stuff that you need to kind of shave off so that it can just be the optimal it will be. So I totally hear that and that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for answering that kind of convoluted question.

Matt Stauffer:
So the transition from there was it was during your time there that you wrote your book and you released it and you were able to transition it to be doing your own educational stuff full time. So in terms of that switch, when and what was the process like for you to start thinking you know what, working at somebody else's consultancy may just not end up being the thing for me and I want to try info products or I want to try my own products or something like that? Like what was that journey like for you?

Adam Wathan:
Yeah, so I think for me what really happened there as I put together this book and released it, I didn't really have crazy expectations for it or anything like that. Again, it was just one of those things where I've always just really liked making polished things that are finished that you can look at and be like this is done and this is tidy and this feels nice. And I used to do that with even like trying to contribute tutorials to Game Facts and stuff back in the day. I never got anything on there, but I would just like agonize over like making some sweet like ASCII art title at the top of these like stupid plain text files-

Matt Stauffer:
That's perfect.

Adam Wathan:
And I just wanted it to feel like a polished thing, right? So that was kind of like one of my biggest motivations for making the book was first of all, I've always been interested in like creating something and selling it and seeing like what it's like to make your own money on the internet sort of thing, but I also just like ... It's hard to think back to it now because I have a few products now, but back then I kind of felt like I just had never got to finish anything, if that makes sense?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, definitely.

Adam Wathan:
And this is a common thing that I think like agencies deal with a lot in general, right? As you get to work with a client, you do a lot of really great work for them, but you're not necessarily like always around 'till the end of the project because maybe eventually they hire their own team which is one of their goals from the beginning, right? They're trying to get like a head start on something so that once they have a little bit of traction they can build their own team around it, because of course that's more economical way to handle that.

Adam Wathan:
Or the other end of the spectrum is you start working on a project for someone and it turns out that they just aren't able to hold up their end of the bargain really and the project is just not going to work out and you do work for them for six weeks and then they realize like you know what, I'm not ever going to be able to make an app company properly, so you kind of just say okay, thanks for your work, you did a great job, but like that's the end of the project. Like I've worked on so many projects that never even went to production, you know?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
Or got any users or anything like that and that's kind of like a ... At the time that was kind of "I just want to finish something. I just want to have something that's done." I did that with my Nitpick too, that little SaaS something-

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I remember.

Adam Wathan:
That I built, and the whole goal there was just the same thing, like I want to build an app 'till it's done and then put it out on the internet, and that was just like a cool feeling. So I did the same thing with the book and then the book ended up being, you know, pretty successful, and before I worked on that book, I had the idea all along that what I really wanted to do was some sort of testing thing, like some TDD book or course or something, but it was just like ... Sounded like so daunting, it just sounded like a big project.

Adam Wathan:
So I stumbled on this idea to the collections thing, and that seemed so much more manageable, so once I had finished that and, you know, it was pretty successful, I thought you know what, if I want to do this like testing product, this is the best possible chance that I'm going to have to be able to spend the time on that because the book did well enough that like I can take six months off and focus on this thing. So I thought you know what, I'm not going to get a chance like this again. If I don't do it now then this money is just going to go into an RSP or something and it's just going to ... Yeah, of course that's good, I should have money saved away for a time.

Matt Stauffer:
Right, right.

Adam Wathan:
I'm not going to ... Like it's not going to change my life in any way, I'm just going to keep doing the exact same thing that I'm doing. The book's going to be out there, but I'm not like seizing the moment to use it as an opportunity to try something. So I thought you know what, this is like the only chance that I'm going to get to probably do this, so why don't I try it out. So that's when I decided to move on to try and to just do something for myself and see how it panned out and I did the testing course, which was way bigger than I even was worried about it being originally.

Adam Wathan:
So it's a good thing that I didn't try and put it together when I was still working, but that did really well too, and that's been able to let me focus on continuing to do more stuff like that. I'm always able to stay just like a little bit enough ahead of where I need to be that I have some time to figure out what the next thing is going to be, you know, and I'm just kind of like building the bridge as I try and cross the river.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's awesome. I remember one of the things that you said when you let us know that you were going to be going off to do the thing full time and you said, "You know, I don't know how this is going to work out, but I know that if it totally flops in six months I can apply to one of a myriad programming jobs, but if I don't try this, there's no guarantee I'll ever have this chance ever again where there's the traction for my book and I have enough money to kind of try this thing and so I got at least try it." And that really stuck with me, just the idea that like ... And I mean I've had that happen where I've had an influx of cash and it just kind of goes and spreads out across retirement savings and health expenses and whatever else, and your life is exactly the same even though you put all that work into it, and so that idea of those are those moments and it's scary, but like what's the worst thing that's going to happen? I'll use up all the money and then apply for jobs on the other end.

Matt Stauffer:
You know I'm a little less stable because I'll have to be applying for a job versus having once settled, but there's no guarantee that your job's not going to shut down the next day, you know, and so like the idea that oh well, everything's perfect now, I'll be put ... No, no. You know, I really love that kind of thinking and obviously at least so far it's working out really well for you, so I'm hoping that's an inspiration for other people to kind of consider taking some of those leaps.

Matt Stauffer:
I would love to ask you a million questions about how you think about product and stuff like that, but we're longer than usual, and thankfully other people have asked you that on their podcasts, so I'm going to try and link some of your stuff with Justin Jackson and some other people, also Full Stack Radio, even though it's you interviewing other people, you do learn a lot about the interviewer by the questions they ask. So all this super interesting stuff that we don't have time for, I hope that we'll be able to ... People will be able to kind of suss that information out anywhere else.

Matt Stauffer:
But I think one of the things we have not talked about, so every time I'm going to be interviewing somebody in the Laravel podcasts I go into Tighten Slack and I say I'm about to interview this person and I'm actually opening my Slack right now to make sure that new questions ... Yep, a couple of new questions came in, and I say, "Are there any particular questions that y'all want to ask them?" And so I ask that question in Tighten Slack, which is kind of funny because you are still in some of our Slacks and you used to work there, but there's still some questions.

Matt Stauffer:
So the first question came up for you is, "Do you even lift, bro? Which first of all is fantastic, but second of all in our Slack that actually triggers a gif of you doing a lift, so it's perfect. So we haven't gotten to talk about that at all.

Adam Wathan:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Where did that fit into your whole world? Can you tell everybody a little bit about kind of that part of your life?

Adam Wathan:
Yeah, so when I was working up in Fort McMurray in Alberta, I've always been kind of like an overweight kid.

Matt Stauffer:
Same.

Adam Wathan:
And like most people, like you just want to look better, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
So when I was working up there, you're just like so bored and you're not using your willpower for basically anything else that it was like an opportunity to finally try and do that seriously, right? It's actually funny because if you follow along with like the bootstrap podcast like Ian and Andre, Andre is kind of doing the same sort of thing. Like he decided to basically take off some time during the year from any really like mentally sort of straining work. Like I think he's just mostly focused on doing some consulting stuff and I'm not even sure if he's working the same amount of hours and stuff that he was doing normally, but he decided like, you know, I want to take this opportunity with this kind of reserve of mental energy that I have and focus on something like really life changing thing, which for him was like getting in shape, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
And it's funny because I never really thought about it that way, but when I heard him phrase it that way it's like you know what, that's exactly like why I was able to do it originally, because I just didn't have anything else pulling at my brain. So when you're going to make dinner or even going out for dinner with your friends it's easy to order the vegetables instead of the fries because like I just haven't used any of that brainpower, you know what I mean?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
So when I was working out there, I just ... It was easier for me to start eating a lot better and get into like home workouts and stuff like that and that led me down this whole path of eventually discovering like strength training. Pro tip; if you're a programmer who wants to like start exercising, the terms that you should be Googling are strength training. That is the term that's going to find you ... At least I think is going to find you the stuff that's going to resonate most with how your brain works in terms of things being really measurable and being able to like science the shit out of everything with lots of percentages and math.

Adam Wathan:
But eventually I kind of stumbled onto this like form of exercise where you're just focusing on like lots of really high bang for your buck compound exercises like multi joint movements like squats and deadlifts and bench press and overhead press and chin ups and barbell rows and stuff like that, and once I finally found the good stuff online which was like Mark Rippetoe's content and stuff like that, you learn like what you should be doing is progressively trying to increase the weight that you're lifting. Like a lot of people just go to the gym and they just like pick whatever they think is going to be like a good weight to lift that day and just do it or whatever, but they're not actually tracking their progress, so they don't really make progress, but if you can develop a plan where you know like okay, this week this is what I'm lifting, next week I have to try and lift this and it goes up and up and up.

Adam Wathan:
For me that's what was able to keep me kind of motivated because I was seeing progress on paper because seeing progress in the mirror is a lot harder, it takes a lot longer and it's a lot more subtle and gradual, and if you're not taking the pictures of yourself topless in the mirror every week to compare like okay, do I actually look like I'm getting in better shape, but if you're just like blogging stuff in a notebook it's easy to say okay, I bench pressed 185 for six reps last week and this week I did it for eight reps, that's pretty cool. So I've kind of gone into this whole thing of getting stronger and lifting and eventually started competing in power lifting competitions because like with everything I do I have to take it to the extreme.

Adam Wathan:
So what started as like 185 pound like skinny fat kid to trying to like look better without his shirt off, turned into like a 260 pound dude deadlifting 600 pounds and winning nationals power lifting gold bells. That was just something ... I would still be doing that, but it's a hard ... Once you get there's like a point of diminishing returns, which I think I definitely hit, where you're just more likely to get injured than you are to make progress, and I've hurt myself a couple times and I have a nagging back injury now that doesn't bother me day to day, but any time I get back into lifting, no matter how light I start, after a couple weeks I do one rep not 100% perfect and my back is messed up for a week, it's really frustrating.

Adam Wathan:
So it's hard for me to really stay motivated into it these days because the thing that kept me going was like getting stronger. So going to the gym to lift less than I did before is like, whatever. I still need to get back into it more, but yeah, that was a big thing for me for a while.

Matt Stauffer:
It's funny because as you were saying that, a light was going off in my head. I switched to a new trainer about four months ago and it was the first time the trainer has been trying to teach me the skills to be able to stop working with him versus just kind of like giving himself job security by just kind of telling me what to do. And he's a Mark Rippetoe guy and he just moved to Chicago, or he's moving to Chicago this weekend and so he's like here's everything I know and he set me up with this thing called ... Have you ever heard of the 5-3-1?

Adam Wathan:
Yep, that's what I always used to do. Jim Wendler.

Matt Stauffer:
That's literally what I started it this week at the new gym on my own and I've got a 5-3-1 calculator.

Adam Wathan:
That's awesome.

Matt Stauffer:
I plug all my information in.

Adam Wathan:
It's amazing. Jim Wendler is like he's the DHH of weight lifting. Like he's just got that same like everyone over complicates things attitude and there's this quote that I ... So this is so funny because like so many people who get into power lifting are like super nerds about this stuff, right? Like the amount of like just nerds that get into this stuff is outrageous just because of the fact that you get to make spreadsheets, you get to calculate like your estimated one rep max based on how many reps you lift this way or whatever.

Adam Wathan:
And I'll never forget there's like a F.A.Q. section in one of Jim Wendler's books where someone asks a question and it's like, what is the best ... I can't remember exactly how it was phrased, but basically the question is like what incline should I be using on like the incline bench? Should it be like a 70 degree incline or a 45 degree incline or a 40 degree incline, like what's going to get me the best results? And Jim Wendler's answer is, "The best incline is whatever the incline is on the bench at your gym." Like it just doesn't matter.

Matt Stauffer:
Just do it. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome.

Adam Wathan:
So it's just like his stuff like really resonated with me because it's just like such no bullshit sort of attitude towards this stuff. But it totally works too, so.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh, I'm so psyched about this. And the way you're describing exactly what's compelling about it and I'll link this in the show notes, but my trainer gave me this thing where you literally just like plug ... It's a giant Java script page, and you just plug in your one rep max's for the four main movements of the bench press, overhead press, squat lift-

Adam Wathan:
Dead lift, yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
And squats and then it just says here's what to do for the next four weeks.

Adam Wathan:
Yeah, so why don't you do this week two and then-

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.

Adam Wathan:
And then you put in like how many reps did you get on your last set, and it will like calculate your estimated one rep max, and for me that was the key because basically there's this formula that Jim Wendler gives you which I think is like weight times reps, divided by 30, plus weight, which is not accurate in the sense of like it doesn't properly model how the number of reps you lift or the weight like compares to like your one rep max would be, but it's like an approximation that's close enough, even though at certain extremes it's like the curve like breaks down where like oh, now you're weaker because you lifted more ... Like it just doesn't make sense, but in like the actual-

Matt Stauffer:
The vast majority of-

Adam Wathan:
Yeah, it's good enough, right? But that was perfect because every week could be lifting different weights for different reps, but you always had this ... Like you could reduce it down to one number to compare like different ... Completely different workouts. So if you bench 185 for like 10 reps or whatever, that's 185 times 10, divided by 30, plus 185, that's ... You have a 247 pound one rep max or whatever, so now you can compare that with lifting and just-

Matt Stauffer:
And just see those numbers go up. Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
205 for seven and you can see which one is better, and even though the workouts are different every week, you can just see over time okay, like this number is continuing to go up. Sometimes maybe it dips down, but overall like the progress is there and that's like a really good way to stay kind of motivated.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I love though that there's a lot of really great apps that help you track your weight and you see how those things go up and down over time, but like you said so many other things it's really hard to just get like a single fixed point you can track over time and I was just talking with Logan this morning and I was telling him about ... Logan who works at Tighten, I was like "Oh, I'm doing this." and he's like "Well, why don't you post your one rep maxes every week in" ... you know, there's a channel at Tighten called Discussed Gains, and he's like, "Why don't you post it in there is so that we can all kind of see it go up." And I was like, "Oh yeah, that is a big motivator. I hadn't thought about it."

Adam Wathan:
So I'll give you an insider tip; if you're looking for ... I don't know if this site ever really got popular, but there's a site called Weightxreps.net, which is like a site for people to manage kind of their weightlifting or power lifting, strength training, training journals.

Matt Stauffer:
Wow.

Adam Wathan:
And the thing that's sick about this site is that you log your workouts in like a custom version of Markdown and it does all the calculations for you and stuff like that.

Matt Stauffer:
Wow.

Adam Wathan:
Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Matt Stauffer:
All right, all this is going in the show notes, folks. I'm sorry if all y'all don't care about this, but I do, so we're talking about it. This is amazing. This is super cool. Okay. All right, so sorry we're super past time, but I have to at least get one or two more of these questions in here. All right, I'm going to give ... all right. "What inspires you to keep learning?"

Adam Wathan:
I don't know that I think it's just an intrinsic motivation. I think I just ... When I find some new thing that I don't know enough about, but I'm passionate about it, then I will figure it out 'till it's end. Like that is just my kind of nature and then I'll probably move on to something else after that. So I don't think like I have any like hacks or anything to help people kind of stay inspired to keep learning. For me, a lot of it is like I like to make stuff, so you try and make something, you hit a problem, and you figure out how to solve it.

Matt Stauffer:
Learn it, yeah.

Adam Wathan:
And I try not to take short cuts on things either. I think sometimes ... I think it's worth like clarifying this in some ways because I listen to you, like all of Justin Jackson's podcasts and sometimes Justin Jackson will bring me up as an example of something, which is flattering, but he'll always say like what I like about Adam is that whenever he like finds a hard problem like he doesn't like figure out a workaround or anything like that, he'll just like drill through the problem until it's solved.

Adam Wathan:
And I think that can be misinterpreted a lot of times to sound like you always want to make things perfect to make everything, you know, like unnecessarily perfect. Like you can solve the problem this other way, but you're going to like solve it the hard way for whatever reason, which I think is not ... I think there's a lot of valid situations where you can like Judo a problem. Like I actually take a lot of pride like Base Camp uses this term, I don't know if other people use it, but I think that's where I first saw it. They talk about like trying to Judo a problem, which is just they have some problem that they need to solve, they try and figure out a way like how can we just like make this problem not exist so we don't have to solve it, you know what I mean?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
Which I think is a really valuable skill and something that like I take pride in a lot trying to figure out ways like okay, I can't figure this out, how can I just make it not exist by solving something in like a different place or whatever, which I think is a really good thing to do, but I am not willing to make compromises on things where it feels like I'm like putting a Band-Aid on something, you know I mean?

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Adam Wathan:
The analogy to me is like okay, there's a hole in your roof. Like you can either fix the hole or we just put a bucket there and we have to empty the bucket every day, but that's fine, the floor doesn't get wet, so the problem is solved, right? Like to me I don't think that that problem is being solved.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I totally agree.

Adam Wathan:
So I can't think of a specific programming analogy necessarily, but like I hate workarounds. I hate things that I feel like Band-Aid fixes.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, but that doesn't mean that you're not going to Judo the problem.

Adam Wathan:
I need to understand something at its core level. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
You may end up making the problem go away or you may end up, you know, picking the faster fix, but it's that you want to actually fix it, and you want to learn how to actually fix it.

Adam Wathan:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
All right, one last question which is, "If you could give everyone you meet one book to read, what book would it be?"

Adam Wathan:
For every single person, like not necessarily programmers?

Matt Stauffer:
I was wondering the same question. Answer it either way you prefer.

Adam Wathan:
So I'm trying to think if I have any books that ... Like I'm sure there's a book that I'm just like blanking on that I think is like just a good book for everyone to read in the world. And I'll probably think about it after the fact, be like, "Duh, that's what I should have said."

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah. If you do, I'll put it in the show notes afterwards, you can message it to me.

Adam Wathan:
I will say from like a programmer's point of view, I think the book that ... The book that really got me started on the right path to learning to program properly and I think a lot of people listening to this podcast probably are already in the right place, but I think it's still worth reading. For me, when I was in college and learning to program in general, the whole idea of like design in terms of like well, architected code was just a concept I didn't even know existed, you know what I mean?

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Adam Wathan:
like I just ... There's like code and you write it and you make it solve a problem and like yes, like some solutions are like more elegant than others I guess, but I never really thought of this like community that exists around like design in code. And it wasn't until I read this book called Agile Practices, Patterns and Principles in C#, which is like the C# version of the original book which is written in Java, but that's by Uncle Bob, and it's ... There's a lot of stuff in there that I think is like ... That I probably wouldn't ... I don't know how to say it. It's like it's one of those things where like you have to like learn the rules to like know how to break the rules and like you can get deep into that book and kind of like get too hung up on this mentality of dependency, inject this, interface that, whatever.

Adam Wathan:
It will make you that way at first, but a lot of people need ... Like everyone needs to go through that phase, but that was the book that I read that ... Like I remember working a part-time job at a warehouse at a retail store and I would be like finding every opportunity I could to like hide in the corner somewhere with my phone to just like read more pages of this book. Because it was just like opening my eyes to so many concepts about writing code that I just wasn't familiar with at all or didn't know existed. So that book really got me started on the right path to even understanding what information to look for on the internet about becoming a better programmer.

Adam Wathan:
So I think from a programming perspective, that would be the game changing one, although it might not be my favorite book anymore, that was the one that I'll always remember as having a really special sort of place in my heart. I'll keep thinking on like the non-programming stuff in case I can come up with something good and maybe you can add it as an addendum to the show notes or something.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, for sure. Well, yeah, I'm just going to say it. I could talk for hours. There's so many more things we could talk about, but we're in an hour and ten minutes, try to cut down to 45 minutes, so we're going to call it a day. So first of all ... Actually before I talk about how people can follow you, is there anything you wanted to talk about or you kind of wish that people knew about you or parts of your story or your background that we didn't get a chance to cover you want to talk about?

Adam Wathan:
I don't think so. I think we talked about basically everything.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, so if people want to follow you or if they don't already own all of your products, which they should, or anything else, where do they find you? What are you plugging these days? You know, that kind of stuff.

Adam Wathan:
Yeah, so I'm @AdamWathan on Twitter. That's kind of where I hang out the most. I have a website at Adamwathan.me that I don't do enough stuff on, but I do have a lot of stuff there to look through. The most recent thing I did is I put out a course on advanced Vue component design, which is kind of like we talked about earlier with like the Rails on Laravel stuff, is me figuring out what people are doing and react, the really interesting react stuff and basically bringing some of that stuff back to the Vue Community and showing people how you can do that stuff. So check that out if you're interested in that.

Adam Wathan:
And aside from that, what can I say? I mean, I'm doing a lot of Tailwind CSS related work these days. It's kind of like my big open source project that I'm working on. Me and Steve Schoger have something pretty exciting in the works around the Refactoring UI content that we've been doing, so keep your eyes peeled for that and yeah, I think that's probably about it. Check out my podcast, Full Stack Radio, if you want to listen to me interviewing people to help solve some these problems I've been solving, trying to solve over the years. I've said it before in other places, but the whole reason I started that podcast was as an excuse to ask Ryan Singer questions, because it seems weird to email him and be like, "Will you answer some questions over Skype?" But if I say, "Will you be a guest on my podcast?" Well, that's a different question.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, a totally different thing. Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
So that's kind of like the whole motivation there, that's just ... You can definitely go through the history episodes and figure out like what problems I'm trying to solve at the time, so check that out if you're interested in some deep dives into some different technical stuff, but yeah, I think that's it.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, Adam dude, it was a total pleasure. I love getting to hang with you any time, but this was especially fun getting to talk about your history and kind of share with everyone, so thank you so much for your time and thank you for all the things you do for the Laravel Community.

Adam Wathan:
Thank you, man. It's been an absolute pleasure being on and yeah, thanks for all you do with this podcast, it's a really fun one to listen to. It's really cool to hear people's stories. I always see episodes pop up and I kind of think at like a surface level like this doesn't look interesting to me, but I'm going to force myself to listen to it anyways, because I know by the time I'm done or even when I'm half way through I'm just going to be like wow, this is like captivating.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Adam Wathan:
And it's been that way for every single one I've listened to, so if anyone hasn't listened to some of the older episodes because maybe they're with people that you haven't heard of and don't think you're going to be interested in, definitely listen to them, because people have really just fascinating and incredible stories to share and Matt does an awesome job of bringing them out, so definitely check that out.

Matt Stauffer:
Thanks, man. Yeah, people are fascinating. All right, man, thank you so much. I'll talk to you later.

Matt Stauffer: Welcome back to the Laravel Podcast, season three. This is the first time we'll be talking to a member of the Tighten team, senior developer Samantha Geitz. Stay tuned.

Matt Stauffer: All right, welcome back to the Laravel Podcast, season three. Like I mentioned in the intro, for the first time ever, I have dipped into the local pool, because I think that the people who work at Tighten are great, because otherwise, they wouldn't work at Tighten. I think they're all fantastic, but I've been trying to avoid nepotism, and if you're not familiar with the concept of nepotism, it's when somebody basically makes their whole ... their family and friends in power, so basically Donald Trump personified. That's nepotism, so I've been trying to not be a nepotist, but at the same time, I mean, there's great people who deserve interviewing.

Matt Stauffer: I figure we're going to start with Samantha Geitz, who is one of our two senior developers; Samantha and Keith are our senior developers, and you may have heard of Samantha before, but before I go into her backstory and who she is and what she's about, the first question I always ask everybody is, when you meet a random person in the store, how do you tell people what it is that you do?

Samantha Geitz: There was a really long period of time where I said, "Well, I'm a software engineer," because it sounded really fancy and I kind of needed that validation.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Samantha Geitz: I've gone back to "I'm a developer," and they ask what that means, and I say, "I build websites, and some of which you've probably used," and I list them off, and usually they kind of glaze over about halfway through, and/or say, "Oh, my company's hiring. Do you use .NET? You should come work for me."

Matt Stauffer: Basically whatever trolls the best. I tell people I make websites, which drives my wife nuts, because she's like, "You don't make websites, you run a company." I'm like, "I don't like telling people that when I first meet them, because then it sets certain expectations." The more that people underestimate me when they meet me, the happier I am.

Samantha Geitz: I was going to say I guess it's true-

Matt Stauffer: Oh, go ahead.

Samantha Geitz: I actually don't make very many websites for Tighten anymore, I'm a PM/therapist/wrangler. I do a lot of hand-holding, talk about feelings a lot. It's a great job.

Matt Stauffer: That is basically what we do at Tighten. We just use code as the excuse for that.

Samantha Geitz: We talk about feelings a lot at Tighten.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, yeah. Okay, Samantha first came onto the scene, when I knew who she was, when she was speaking at Laracon US a couple years ago in Louisville. I don't even know what year it was, 2015 or 2016, 2015, something like that?

Samantha Geitz: 2015.

Matt Stauffer: And speaking about microservices.

Samantha Geitz: It was the new hotness at the time. Taylor introduced it as the most anticipated talk at Laracon right before I walked on stage, and I was like, "Ooh. No pressure."

Matt Stauffer: No pressure, and the funny thing is I don't think you've done any microservice work since you've started at Tighten, right? Or have you?

Samantha Geitz: I have not. No, but you also hate microservices. I'm surprised you hired me after that.

Matt Stauffer: I hate them a little bit, yeah.

Samantha Geitz: Yes, we like this girl's ideas.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, well ... What we liked was the way that you think. That's not necessarily the microservice aspect. Not saying there's nothing good about microservices ever, but it's not ... they're overblown a little. But anyway, you gave that talk. Everyone said, "Wow, who's this Samantha Geitz, she's great." Soon after we open up a job posting, you apply. It was great. That's not the point of this story, but now you're a senior developer, like you mentioned. Day-by-day you write some code, you review some code, you write blog posts a lot. You wrote a three part React series, that has basically taken the internet by storm since it existed, which you keep updating and I'll put a link to that in the show notes. You are one of the lead React thinking people in the Laravel world. You're the one who contributed the React preset to Laravel. That's one area you're known a little bit.

Matt Stauffer: If you haven't heard of Samantha before, go read a couple of her blog posts on the Tighten blog. Go check out the React preset. Go check out a React series. Even if you know React already, it's a really good broad level introduction. That stuffs all great, but that's not what this podcast is about. This podcast is about people.

Matt Stauffer: The next question I always ask everybody is, when was the first time that you interacted with a computer, and tell me about it.

Samantha Geitz: Well my dad had a computer science background. When I was really young, like five maybe, we were using Logo to build tic, tac, toe and obviously I was not writing much of the code at age five, but I sat with him when he did it and it sparked an interest, but as I grew up, I always thought computer science was A, for boys, B, involved a lot of math and even though I'm technically good at math, I did well on the GRE in math, I just thought I was bad at math and I can go into all the feminist reasons about that on Twitter if anyone's interested, we don't need to spend the whole podcast. I want to get on my platform and talk about it.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Samantha Geitz: I didn't really take computer science seriously as a career. I had built some websites and stuff in high school in Joomla. I'm dating myself here, but my last semester of my English Literature degree, and fun fact, if people don't know, both Matt and Dan are also English majors, so Tighten's got a very strong liberal arts background.

Matt Stauffer: It's true.

Samantha Geitz: I took a computer science course as an elective because it was literally the only thing that fit into my schedule and I was the only woman in the class and walked in. I immediately got picked out by this professor, who was a very nice man, but also this old Eastern European man. Caught me after the first day and said, "Oh, if you need extra help let me know." And within three weeks I was tutoring a quarter of the class.

Samantha Geitz: Well I had realized by that point, because my background was in English Literature but I wanted to be an English teacher and got through all of my English Literature course work and then started the education component and said, "Oh, no. I hate teenagers. This is going to be awful." Yeah, when I took that computer science course, I said, "Oh, cool. So this is what I want to do when I grow up." Went back to grad school and got a masters in information science and I guess the rest we will probably cover in future questions here.

Matt Stauffer: We will, but I have so many questions. I have so many questions. Your dad, computer science. You're five years old, making tick tac toe in what?

Samantha Geitz: Logo. It's a programming language where you move a turtle around the screen.

Matt Stauffer: Logo.

Samantha Geitz: I think it's like Scratch. This was almost 25 years ago.

Matt Stauffer: Oh okay.

Samantha Geitz: I couldn't tell you a lot of the specifics.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. It's just funny. This is the first time anybody's ever mentioned something I've never even heard of before, programming language wise. Okay, but it was focused on kids learning?

Samantha Geitz: I think so yeah. I know my dad had probably C and basic and I don't even know what. He's now trying to learn Laravel. I have two brothers who are Laravel developers and my dad has decided he wants to get into that life too. We have a Slack channel where he posts questions and it's fun.

Matt Stauffer: That's awesome. Tell me that he has a copy of my book, please?

Samantha Geitz: He does not ... No, he does.

Matt Stauffer: I will mail him one.

Samantha Geitz: It's in a PDF. I sent him a PDF.

Matt Stauffer: Okay I was going to say, I will mail him one.

Samantha Geitz: Sign it.

Matt Stauffer: Jeez. Okay. Yeah, definitely. Okay, you did Logo. Was there much computing? Were you on Instant Messenger and stuff like that in between that time and when you were in college? Or were you not a computer person during that time?

Samantha Geitz: Oh, I was PC gaming master race from a very, very young age.

Matt Stauffer: Okay, so you've been sitting on ... Yeah, you totally skipped that part of it. Let's talk about that.

Samantha Geitz: That's how I win typing challenges. Yeah, no. I had a computer in my room from the time I was in eighth grade. Yeah. Oh, I got into all sorts of shenanigans in Instant Messenger and stuff. I was 10, cat fishing people.

Matt Stauffer: Oh my goodness. I didn't even know what that word meant until college.

Samantha Geitz: ASL, 18 female California and I'm 10 years old.

Matt Stauffer: Oh my God.

Samantha Geitz: This is a family friendly podcast so we don't need to get into that.

Matt Stauffer: There you go, we'll just keep it there. Cat fishing. Go Google it, it's a type of fish and it is a ... nevermind, I'm not even going to go there.

Samantha Geitz: I'm turning my camera so Matt can see my rig. Look at that bad boy with a cat on it.

Matt Stauffer: You should take a picture of it without a cat hanging ... or with the cat hanging over it so we can put a link in the podcast. In the show notes.

Samantha Geitz: I've got the clear panel on the side so you can see ... Yeah, I've got some good hardware in there too. I've had a $900 graphics card in there.

Matt Stauffer: Geez. Okay, you learned that stuff from your dad. Computer science. You cat fished people when you're 10 years old. You built your own PC's and you're playing video games. Was there anything formal before you went into college? Was there anything outside of you doing it on your own, or was this more like you had the interest and you did all the stuff? Obviously you said at age 10 you had interest access, or was this bulletin board services?

Samantha Geitz: I did have internet access and yeah, I would be on various forums and stuff, but when I was 15 I think, I also, English background, dabble in writing, surprise, surprise. I ran a writing community website that I built on Joomla, I don't wonder what form software I used. Simple core maybe.

Matt Stauffer: Okay.

Samantha Geitz: It was completely hacked together. There was a little bit of PHP, but it was a lot of just customizing templates and stuff, which for me was a very different thing than, "I'm going to go get a computer science degree and do the calculus I guess, because that's what computer science is." Right?

Matt Stauffer: Right. Well and that was my next question actually, is at what point did you actually write a line of web based codes? You mentioned you did Logo, so you had coding from age five, but when do you actually write web code?

Samantha Geitz: That would have been high school.

Matt Stauffer: Okay.

Samantha Geitz: It was probably undergrad years.

Matt Stauffer: There's no classes for it. You were just view sourcing around on the internet and figuring it out as you went?

Samantha Geitz: Yeah, it was a lot of, "I'm done loading this template and making it look the way I want it to look and I don't really know what I'm doing." I was not doing anything too complex.

Matt Stauffer: Right, just FTPing it up to some kind of general shared host?

Samantha Geitz: Yeah, it was all FTP.

Matt Stauffer: Okay, all right.

Samantha Geitz: Very much hacking my around. I did not have a solid grasp on it where if someone could have probably paid me and gotten good work out of it. At our peak we had about, for the writing website, maybe 250 active members.

Matt Stauffer: Nice.

Samantha Geitz: It wasn't too small time for someone who was 15.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, speaking of people paying you. What was the first dollar you made making websites, or making any code actually for that matter?

Samantha Geitz: That would have been in grad school. I did some freelance work because I very quickly realized that my grad program, we did some programming stuff but it was Flash in 2012.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Samantha Geitz: I very quickly figured out that I was not going to be learning the sort of things I could go get a web development job for. I was working when I started grad school in admissions at the University of Missouri Graduate School and trying to do that and full time masters program, and self-teach was just too much. I took a risk and quit my job and just made a living for the rest of grad school freelancing. That would have been ... I think my first client paid me three grand for a pretty complex WordPress site.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, I was going to ask was tech stack were you doing most of that freelancing in? Mainly WordPress?

Samantha Geitz: It was pretty much all WordPress in the freelancing and then I was self-teaching Ruby on Rails.

Matt Stauffer: Did you do the front ends of those or did you use templates mainly?

Samantha Geitz: I did a lot of child themes so I used Genesis or something and then build themes based off of that.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, okay. You had at least front end capability. You probably knew CSS and jQuery, JavaScript all that stuff by that point?

Samantha Geitz: Yup.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. Then Ruby on Rails. Tell us that journey.

Samantha Geitz: Laravel, if it existed at the time was not well known. I mean this would have probably been Laravel 2.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Samantha Geitz: Basically I was just looking into, okay, I wanted to build web applications. I very quickly figured out the limits of WordPress and I don't know. Ruby on Rails was hotness then, so I built myself a personal blog site just to learn it. I don't think anyone has ever paid me to write Ruby on Rails code.

Matt Stauffer: Okay.

Samantha Geitz: But it gave me decent MVC background and my first job, I was at ... I was just about to finish grad school and I was at the University of Missouri and I was back up at Chicago at a Ruby meetup and there was an open bar that was sponsored by, gosh I don't even remember. One of the API companies, so I met this guy who said, "Oh yeah, My company's hiring and we do Rails." And I was like, "Okay, cool."

Samantha Geitz: He got me this interview and got the job and then they told me I would be doing WordPress. It's like, "Oh okay. That's fine. It's not really what I want to be doing." But they said eventually they'll move me over to a more of a MVC stack and I proceeded to do WordPress for the next year and a half.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Samantha Geitz: But we landed a client who was going to not be great for WordPress so I was looking into Laravel at the time, because I had a really strong PHP background. Hadn't done Rails in a while, and that was right ... That was Laravel 3, because Laravel 4 was released somewhere in the middle of that project and we upgraded. Yeah, that was how I got into Laravel. Was just wishing I could do Ruby on Rails and I've got this WordPress background so I know PHP, so I guess this is what we're doing now.

Matt Stauffer: Right. Was the clients, I don't know if you remember, it's been a while, but was the client's tech stack such where if you had been a super accomplished Ruby developer they would have signed on, or would they prefer PHP as well at that point?

Samantha Geitz: Are you talking about at the last agency that I worked at?

Matt Stauffer: That one company where you discovered Laravel 3.

Samantha Geitz: They had been ...

Matt Stauffer: Do you remember?

Samantha Geitz: They had been pitched on a WordPress site, because ... The company I worked at, which I don't think technically even exists anymore, it's called Dojo. They were a very small number of ... It's called WordPress VIP agency. WordPress VIP definitely still exists. It's actually a fantastic service, but it's basically automatic. Who's the company who does WordPress. It's their premium hosting and support solution. I think it starts ... Then it was $3,500 a month.

Samantha Geitz: You had sites like Pandora with their entire advertising platform was built on it. I think Time Magazine. We did a lot of work for Tribune. I actually got a lot of enterprise WordPress experience, just because they wanted ... There's only 10 shops in the world who did it.

Matt Stauffer: That actually do that kind of work.

Samantha Geitz: The problem was we just pitched WordPress for everything and when it's something that doesn't really fit into that posts and pages paradigm, and they wanted all sorts of crazy relationships between entities and stuff, so I steered them away from that and I had a lot of flexibility in the stack I could use, so I had been looking to Laravel a little bit, and said, "I'm going to learn it." And I used that project to learn it.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Samantha Geitz: It was pre Laracasts too. I think.

Matt Stauffer: I could be wrong, but I believe that Laracasts came out during 4, but I could be wrong. I've got to go look that up later.

Samantha Geitz: I used Dayle Rees' book to learn it.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, there you go.

Samantha Geitz: It was called Code Bright I think.

Matt Stauffer: Code something.

Samantha Geitz: Whatever the Laravel 3 one.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah exactly.

Samantha Geitz: That was how I learned Laravel.

Matt Stauffer: Nice. Yeah, that's how I learned it too, and then eventually Jeffrey. All right at that point ... I was trying to think. There was a couple of questions rolling around. I had rolling around about prior to that. I'm trying to think about your background.

Matt Stauffer: You had got ... did you finish your undergrad degree in English before you went to do the CS? Okay. I'm sorry, she nodded.

Samantha Geitz: Yeah, it was just an elective. I had some elective I had to take to graduate. I was working full time at Best Buy and just was the only thing that slotted into my schedule.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Samantha Geitz: I was like, "Okay. I'm not sure how this is going to go because I haven't taken math in five years."

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, turns out.

Samantha Geitz: Clearly it worked out.

Matt Stauffer: Turns out. Okay you worked, you're doing WordPress. You did a little bit of Laravel 3, what was the next transition from there.

Samantha Geitz: Okay, I don't want to do WordPress anymore, I know Laravel know, so I got a job at this start up called PackBack. Who are still around. They are a Shark Tank funded start-up in Chicago. Mark Cuban's on their board.

Matt Stauffer: Aye-oh.

Samantha Geitz: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: You can see them on YouTube right? I feel like I saw that at some point.

Samantha Geitz: Probably.

Matt Stauffer: Their episode.

Samantha Geitz: Yeah, I got a job working there and pretty specifically as a back end developer, because their front end stack was Angular and the big Laravel project I'd done for the previous agency, we had a ton of ... it ended up being a very complicated Angular set up and people hear me talk about Angular PTSD and that's why. It was just a single page application that should not have been a single page application. It was just a lot of Angular.

Samantha Geitz: Yeah, I pretty much did strictly API development for the next year and a half after that. It was all Laravel and it was microservices, and that's how I got really pumped about that idea, which also meant my front end chops took a nose dive, which is a big part of the reason I ended up learning React. It's like, all right, I need to get back into this world.

Matt Stauffer: Get back into it. Yeah.

Samantha Geitz: We don't have API developers at Tighten.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. No, everybody does everything. Let's talk about your work there a little bit. I think everyone has a pretty good sense of the value of single page apps in API first. Just to recap real quick for anybody who hasn't heard these pitches. API first basically means build the API, then build a JavaScript single page app that consumes that API. Then when you need to build a mobile app it'll magically be fast and easy and quick, because you already have an API that works. There's definitely some true promise there.

Matt Stauffer: One of the things we've talked about a lot lately at Tighten, over the last year is as someone ... I'm a little bit of an old head developer where I'm just like, "Hey, you know what? This is the way I've been doing it for x number of years. I want to keep doing it." But I wanted to leave space for us to try those things. The SPA's and the API first stuff like that. We've definitely seen some of the pain points of microservices. Some of the pain points of SPAs and stuff like that.

Matt Stauffer: I would say the bigger your team, the bigger the company, the bigger your needs, the more likely the mobile needs, the more likely that you will find the API first and the SPAs to be worth the costs they introduce. I would assume that where you were, would have been one of the places where that's just a clear win. I don't want to dig too much into their intellectual property or anything like that, but you mentioned that an SPA may end up being a little tough in some context. Without revealing any of their secrets or anything like that, is there anything you can talk about that helps you understand when you think an SPA is or is not the right fit? Are there any signs? Anything like that that helps you really think through that?

Samantha Geitz: I feel like where I've gone on it is, yeah, if you know you're going to have a lot ... I say you know, and one of the things about working with a start-up is you hope. You hope you're going to grow, you hope you're going to be handling a lot of traffic and stuff, and I think a lot of companies end up doing a lot of premature optimization based on that.

Samantha Geitz: Compared to a situation in which you're refactoring a monolith and it makes sense to break off some asynchronous tasks into a microservice. That's a place I would definitely reach for it now.

Samantha Geitz: Single page applications that have a lot of views and very complicated authentication and authorization requirements, my preferred way now is to have a Laravel app with Vue or React components where you're utilizing a lot of server side stuff, and a lot of out of the box authentication things and then just the really interactive UI things that makes sense to have JavaScript that's where you have ... I have found that to be easiest personally. I think a single page application, if it's really a single page can be great.

Samantha Geitz: I think a single page application where you're trying to have some very complicated web application with multiple pages, gets complicated. There are routers and stuff that can help you handle it and I can see the argument for using it, but I have always found that the overhead is a lot more than using something like Laravel or Rails with server side stuff.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, it's interesting.

Samantha Geitz: You don't have to worry about someone going into a console and messing around and seeing encrypted things. I don't know.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned the single page because single page app ... Theoretically the single page is referring to the fact that it's a single page that doesn't get navigated away from, but like you mentioned, single page apps are a lot less complicated when they don't have to handle I guess what you'd say like theoretical multiple pages that are served by that one page. You could say how many URLs does it serve? If that single pages serves a single URL your complexities going to a lot lower than if that single page serves multiple URLs using a router.

Samantha Geitz: Yeah, not to say that you should never have multiple views in a single page application, because of course that's silly, but if you have a Laravel app with 30 controllers that all have all these routes and stuff, and you're trying to do that in the context of a single page application, can you do it? Sure. Is it going to be a lot more code and overhead than if you did it service side? Yes. Absolutely.

Matt Stauffer: The question is do the pros outweigh the cons in that context? Sometimes the assumption can be well it's the new thing and eventually we can use it therefore yes, but you've got to realize the cons. Caleb's been talking about it a lot this recently because he lived in microservice land for a while, so he was becoming a little bit of the captain of the cons of microservices. I'll have to ask him about that another time. I think that you are ... obviously you know microservices, but you also know full stack routing JavaScript, all this stuff, super, super, super well.

Matt Stauffer: You gave a talk about microservices. It's funny, Chris Fidao gave a talk about hexagonal architecture and as far as I know doesn't do it at all right now. You gave a talk about microservices and obviously I haven't assigned you to any projects in the microservices sense, but I know that you do side stuff. If you were doing a side project, do you default monolith right now, and if so, can you tell me one or two really clear signs that tells you to ... Regardless of SPA versus anything else. One or two clear signs that makes you want to pole servers out.

Samantha Geitz: Yeah, I can actually give a concrete example from the last six months. A friend and I were working on basically ... Call it LinkedIn for professional gamers. We realized specifically for this game Overwatch which more recently has ... It's called Overwatch League which almost is like a professional sports franchise model and these were selling for 15 million dollars. Where it's like the Houston Outlaws.

Matt Stauffer: That's a crazy number.

Samantha Geitz: Yeah, I mean there was a lot of money floating around the scene and these professional players, there was a discord chat room in which these coaches and owners for these 15 million dollar teams would be scrolling through players looking for teams. So we're like oh, there's an opportunity here.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Samantha Geitz: We basically built an app to hook professional players up with teams and one of the things we wanted to do to keep people coming back was to integrate their Twitter and Twitch stuff and Twitch specifically doesn't have any web hooks or anything where it's like, "Oh, this new thing is on Twitch, we hit your app." We had to pole it.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Samantha Geitz: It was just this process I was constantly running in the background and basically I built some logic into the main app to figure out who needed to be refreshed, because obviously if someone is streaming, you want to refresh them more often, so when they're offline they're no longer showing.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, yeah.

Samantha Geitz: The actual thing that was hitting the Twitch API was a totally separate microservice just because it was this process that was constantly running and I didn't want that load on my regular server.

Matt Stauffer: It's funny. That's my exact same use case is that when I'm finding myself in a place where I'm interacting with a third party server that doesn't present the data I want or in the timeline that I want or takes too much load, that's the first thing I want to do, is I build the API I want, and then I make that API do all the work of getting the data into that shape or whatever. I like that.

Samantha Geitz: Yeah, anything that you would have to run asynchronously and could put a lot of strain on your server and you want to make sure that ... I would reach for a microservice before I'd start getting into crazy load balancing stuff for infrastructure because I think it's pretty easy to just build something that does a thing. You can swap it out easily if you need to.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Samantha Geitz: But would I build a separate microservice for users? Probably not. Just to have it different.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. Your day job is at Tighten. We talk about what you do there. You also speak at conferences and you also blog. Even though you don't love teenagers you did end up teaching. Tell me, who is your most common audience that you're thinking about when you're giving a talk, and what are your most and least favorite things about giving conference talks?

Samantha Geitz: I gave a talk a couple of weeks ago at Erie Day of Code and I literally had a slide where I made assumptions about the audience and one of them was that they're white males. It was a feelings talk about actually design patterns and microservices and crazy architecture. Looking into the reasons that people use that.

Matt Stauffer: Interesting.

Samantha Geitz: I feel like a lot of it is imposter syndrome where you feel like people on Twitter get very opinionated about software and say things like, "Why are you putting models in your controllers? You should have a repository for this." Just get really dogmatic about it. You get to the point where you can build anything, even if that's just in a way where you just have very basic MVC and you start learning more about design patterns and you just want to apply them to everything because you have this knowledge that's so exciting, and also are you going to be judged if you don't.

Samantha Geitz: I would like to start speaking at more women in tech spaces, but I'm very aware whenever I'm in front of an audience that it's mostly white guys in the 25 to 35 age range.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Samantha Geitz: I mean that's generally the audience I'm aware of. I do hate public speaking through. I'm very introverted despite my personality on Twitter and getting up in front of a crowd and speaking is very, very overwhelming for me sometimes.

Matt Stauffer: What's your best trick for when you're preparing to give a talk to help either reduce your nerves or prepare in a way that would make you feel more confident or something like that?

Samantha Geitz: I just don't over prepare and I get up there and just almost treat it like a conversation. I've been told I'm a very conversational speaker. I feel like if I over rehearse I will get very stilted. I also give myself permission to use a little profanity if that's ...

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Samantha Geitz: Or make jokes if those are there. Sooner or later I'm going to make a very off color joke in a very public place and it's going to get me into trouble, but it hasn't really happened yet.

Matt Stauffer: So far, so good.

Samantha Geitz: So far, so good. It's one of those things I just muscle through and it's gotten better over the course of my career. I told Matt at my last review in November I think, that that was my goal for 2018 was to get back out there and give a bunch of talks and not let my stagefright overwhelm me and I'm two in and Laracon coming up in July, so when you give me my review next week Matt ...

Matt Stauffer: Hopefully we'll look positively on that. You told me the thing that you like the least which is public speaking. What do you like the most about giving conference talks?

Samantha Geitz: Clearly the Twitter fame. When you see that follower count tick up. It is the Twitter fame. I'm trying to think of another ... it's like, no.

Matt Stauffer: That's true. That's okay.

Samantha Geitz: It's fun getting up there and doing a good job and knowing that I conquered my fear of public speaking and didn't ruin my career.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Samantha Geitz: I just gave a React workshop at PeersConf and it was pretty small. I think it was maybe 15, 20 people and so I had a lot of space to go around and work with people one-on-one and get people excited about this technology that I'm really excited about and that was cool too. Just getting that really face-to-face time, compared to being on stage and talking at 800 people, most of whom are probably just screwing around on their laptops anyway.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Samantha Geitz: I had a lot of people come up to me after my white boy feelings talk at Eerie Day of Code too and say, "Oh actually that really resonated with me. That yes, I was there in my career too and I understand that impostor syndrome is a thing for men that isn't talked about."

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Giving people permission to experience the things they're experiencing and language for understanding what it is.

Samantha Geitz: Something we talk a lot about a Tighten and it's something that's talked a lot about in various women in tech circles, but I feel like tech as a whole, we don't talk a lot about mental health issues, we don't talk a lot about impostor syndrome and the fact that everyone experiences and if you don't you probably have horrible Dunning-Kruger and you're a lost cause.

Samantha Geitz: One of the things I had in my slide that I'm going to assume about you is A, anyone at that conference is very smart and cares about writing good code.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Samantha Geitz: Because you're not going to conferences if you don't care, but also that you're aware of that fact for everybody else in the room. You know that everyone else in tech is smart and is trying to do a good job and you compare yourself to that bar and that's a very intimidating thing. I think women feel it more acutely or people of colors, people who are more outside of the mainstream, but white guys feel it too and it's something that's just not discussed. I think to the determent of all of us.

Matt Stauffer: I think that's really helpful. Especially a lot of conversations that certain around understanding the diversity of experiences, especially a sentence that says, "Women and people of color experience this more." I think a lot of people instantly hear that you're going to be telling white guys that, "Oh well, we have it really easy." I think it's really helpful to hear, I think for everybody to hear someone say, "Women and people of color have it especially tough, but white guys, nobody's talking about the fact that you experience this thing as well." And it's not just white guys. It's men that aren't white, or white people that aren't men, but the more ...

Samantha Geitz: Yeah, non binary, trans.

Matt Stauffer: But by that I mean the more normative. My white male, heterosexual, Christian, blah, blah, blah American. The less likely you tend to feel in these kind of conversations that there's a space where you actually have valid experiences, valid pains, valid difficulties, and there's a lot we can say about that that this is not the podcast for, but I think one of the things I really appreciate is that in a context where you are explicitly saying, "Hey, it can be harder in these contexts to be a woman or a person of color, or whoever else, that does not mean that other people aren't having this experience. That does not mean that people with privilege or however you want to talk about it, are not also having impostor syndrome issues, and sometimes it's actually less approved for white guys to talk about these things.

Matt Stauffer: I think I'm really grateful that you as not a white guy are giving people that permission to feel that, the language for that and everything. That's super cool.

Samantha Geitz: I mean ultimately the main takeaway of the talk about reading other people's code, good code or bad code is, you don't know the space they were in when they were writing it. You don't know their motivations for writing it, but it was never that they were trying to make your life miserable.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Samantha Geitz: No one wrote code like, "I want the person who maintains this after me to struggle." Treat people with kindness even if you will never see them because you inherited it. You have to give them the benefit of the doubt sometimes because everyone does have those struggles in this industry. It's really tough.

Matt Stauffer: That's a great point. I mean honestly, imagine the worst pressure you've ever been under during a coding session where the client was pushing you. They're rushing you and your dog just died the day before and you want to do really great work, but the client needs something tomorrow and then they cut off the contract after that, and you did your best but you aren't proud of that. Every time you interact with somebody else's code, imagine that they were in that circumstance and it's like the, "Oh okay, maybe they're not a total bumbling idiot." But maybe they weren't in ... It's like people often say, you compare other people's worst code against your best code, or whatever. The code you think you write even in your head even though it's not actually the code you write.

Samantha Geitz: Exactly. Sometimes that code that you're looking at that's the bad code is your own code and you need to be able to forgive yourself for writing bad code six months ago, because you didn't know better. I mean I feel like if you're not looking at code from six months ago and saying, "WFT was I thinking?"

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, yeah, you're not growing.

Samantha Geitz: That means you're not improving. That's not a good thing.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Samantha Geitz: That was a cool talk and a lot of people came up to me after and said that they enjoyed it and it resonated with them. I'm sure a lot of people were sitting there like, "This is stupid."

Matt Stauffer: She's terrible.

Samantha Geitz: "I am the smartest person in this room."

Matt Stauffer: Right yeah. They have other problems.

Samantha Geitz: They weren't picking fights with me so that's fine.

Matt Stauffer: Well and that's the Twitter fame part right? If you ... not to say that we never get any benefit out of giving these talks. Sometimes you get paid, sometimes you have certain experiences, but when we're speaking at the type of conferences we're speaking at, we're not making life changing money. We're not making even pay you back for your time kind of money. We're making, "Hey, I'm going to try and minimize the cost when you just took off work for five days kind of money." Or whatever else.

Samantha Geitz: Right.

Matt Stauffer: There's at least an element, and I think usually a pretty large element of doing it because you want to help people, and you want people to learn and you want people to grow. In terms of the joke that you made about, "I do it for the Twitter fame." I mean what I hear there and I'm pretty sure this is what you meant was hearing the feedback from people that the work that you just put into trying to help them helped them is one of the most affirming things that you can get after a talk. You're like, "Oh, I overcame impostor syndrome and I overcame public speaking anxiety and I spent all that time preparing it and it's making the impact I wanted to make." And that makes you want to go do the thing again. Did I just read you right on that?

Samantha Geitz: It is. You did. It's a very affirming experience and I do think it's very important. Whether or not you do public speaking or blogging or tech overflow or just making it publicly known on Twitter that you're available for mentorship, I think it is really important in this industry to give back and to talk about your failures and successes and to pass it along to the next generation of developers. I mean that does have normalize it I think. It helps normalize the shared experience where you see people's victories on social media and not their struggles. I'm not going to go on Twitter and say, "I had a really bad day where I was struggling with this thing and just didn't get it and I feel awful about myself right now." Or. "I dealt with this exact issue six months ago and screwed it up and it was a big deal, but I survived and here was my takeaway."

Matt Stauffer: I survived.

Samantha Geitz: One of the things that I've realized over my career and then working with more junior people is, sometimes I get tasked something and I have no idea how to do it, but I have the experience now to know that I've managed to figure it out every other time.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Samantha Geitz: And every single other time it's been okay and a lot of my job now is just talking to our more junior developers and saying, "It'll be okay. You will figure it out. You have the team behind you. No ones going to judge you if you don't get it right on the first time. That's what code review is for and also, I did it and screwed it up this one time so if you have this bad day where you got a bad code review, it's fine." Everyone's the hardest on themselves generally I think.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, that's a good point. We're short on time, but this serves as one more question I want to ask and then we'll start rolling down a little bit.

Samantha Geitz: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: You have worked for consultancies and product companies. This may be a hard question to answer, but if it's not, now that you work at a consultancy, what is the best and worst aspect of working at a consultancy relative to working at in a product company?

Samantha Geitz: When I joined PackBack, they were still fairly young. They were migrating from this really gross Magneto thing to a Greenfield thing. I got the Greenfield fun, new shiny experience, but then we got to the point where we're launched and maintaining. Working at a consultancy gives you the opportunity to work with a very, very large array of projects and some of them are going to be Greenfield new and shiny and you learn new things, some of them are going to be, oh God, there's this awful legacy app and then you'll learn new things.

Matt Stauffer: Right, right.

Samantha Geitz: I think it's really, really easy to get a very wide diversity of experiences and that is going to make you an awesome developer and you'll be able to tackle a lot of things that come your way and see pitfalls that you wouldn't if you were just working on one platform consistently. I do love product, that's why I'll always have separate side hustles going. Especially now that I'm not day-to-day on code as much at Tighten, just so I can stay on top of the new shiny and I've never worked for a Google, or in Chicago like Groupon or Grub Hub or some of the bigger ones. I've never had that experience. All my enterprise-y stuff has been I'm developing this large WordPress site or something, or working on ... I'm one developer working on this small piece for this other company, not I'm part of this very large team in a very medium sized fish in a huge, huge, huge pond.

Samantha Geitz: That's one thing I've lacked in my career and now that I work at Tighten have no desire to go seek at all. Not to say I don't have that opportunity but nah, I'm good.

Matt Stauffer: All right so you just said very nice things about consultancy's. Was the worst thing snuck in there about, "Oh, I like to do product stuff?" Or is there a worse thing about working for consultancy that you can share?

Samantha Geitz: I feel like if you work for a good consultancy who helps ... one of the problems with client works is they're stress tends to trickle in and become your stress or sometimes becomes a deluge and it's your stress. I mean agencies and consultancies have a very bad reputation for burning people out and working them crazy hours and crunch time and deadlines and let's plan things six months out and make this promise and then oh God, we're not going to be able to deliver. I've had both.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Samantha Geitz: I've not so much had the latter at Tighten, but I would be very ... If Tighten shut its doors tomorrow I would probably go to a product company over another consultancy unless I really knew that stress was not going to become my stress because I just ... at this point in my life, don't want to deal with it anymore. I'm not working 60 to 80 hour weeks. I'm just not.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, I think you have to be super intentional in any company to create good working environment and the product company, when you create a good working environment it stays relatively stable, whereas with a consultancy it's your working environment plus you're working environment protecting you against any potentially problematic client working environments. There's two vectors of attack.

Samantha Geitz: Right. Yeah and the clients are constantly changing and rotating probably and a lot of times they're coming to you because, "Oh, we have this massive deadline and we don't have the manpower to meet it." Or, "Our stuff is so broken and it's ... We need help." We've had a lot of people come to us, "All of our tests are failing and we just don't have the space to fix it. Please come help us." Projects like that can be really, really fun, but it's always an opportunity for stress.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, stress to sneak in.

Samantha Geitz: Matt and I have a lot of conversations like, "Okay, how do we keep stress from trickling down to the developers?"

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Samantha Geitz: That's a lot of my job is just to be a shield against that.

Matt Stauffer: Very cool. I will make it through a podcast one day without saying I could talk for hours. Today's not that day. I could talk for hours, but we're out of time. Is there anything that you wanted to cover that we haven't gotten a chance to talk about yet?

Samantha Geitz: Oh man, I don't know. Should we plug the dev battle? When's this podcast being released?

Matt Stauffer: This will be released within the next week. I've heard that some company, I don't know. Some company you might work at will deal with it, but I'm trying not to nepotize that, but if that's what you want to plug to your guests then go ahead.

Samantha Geitz: Oh no. This is the Laravel podcast nepotism and feelings version for sure. Back on the React track, if you are interested in learning more about React Native specifically and/or Native tools if you care about Vue. No one listening to this podcast cares about Vue though clearly. It's Keith Damiani, who's the other senior developer and I had a dev battle about a year ago and I still think the results were bananas, but Vue was declared the winner, so we're doing a round two. Or I guess a part two with three rounds and it's the React Native versus Native Tools battle. It is called Native Tools ...

Matt Stauffer: I think it's Native Script right?

Samantha Geitz: Is it Native? No you're right, it's Native Script. See you can tell how much I know about this. I just literally wrote a blog post about it too. Native Script. Part one is going to be we basically just build a super basic card app. We're either going to just save it to whatever local storage or I have an API set up with predefined user authentication tokens.

Samantha Geitz: Round two is authentication authorization, so trying to figure all that out and round three, because a question. We've not done a React Native project yet as a company and one of the questions Matt and Dan are always asking me is how much code reuse is possible, so if we want to build a web app can we use React Native code?

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Samantha Geitz: Round three is us taking those apps and then basically building a web app also and seeing how we can reuse code. We also have Caleb Porzio joining Team Vue and Daniel Coulbourne joining Team React. We've pulled the 20% time ...

Matt Stauffer: 20% FM.

Samantha Geitz: Yup. Pulled those guys in. Oh and the one thing I didn't mention is we don't really know these tools that well, so we're just figuring it out on the fly. Paring and ...

Matt Stauffer: It's very different ... Last time it was a React developer and a Vue developer with an unknown task. Now it is you know the task but you don't know the code. It's going to be a total flip of what it was last time.

Samantha Geitz: Right, we have mock ups, we have the API. Everyone knows what we're building, which oddly, even though I don't know this and once again, the internet might look at me and be like, "Oh, what is this girl doing?" It's so much less pressure. I'm okay with live coding with the expectation like, "I don't know what I'm doing. I'm figuring it out."

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Samantha Geitz: "If I don't figure it out, okay, you try to figure out React Native in four hours bozo."

Matt Stauffer: Versus trying to pretend to be the expert and then people can criti ... yeah yeah.

Samantha Geitz: Exactly, exactly. The pressure of live coding for any of y'all who haven't done it, especially in a timed battle context.

Matt Stauffer: It's extreme.

Samantha Geitz: Things that I do every day, I was like, "How do I do this? I need to look it up." It's hard and I'm not even sweating this one, but it is ... if it's coming out next week, it'll be this Friday, May 25th. It's battle.tighten.co we have all the info and there's a blog post coming out too.

Matt Stauffer: If you listen to this after the fact, the recording will be there as well. Whether you listen to this before or after the battle still go to that same site.

Samantha Geitz: Well there's going to be three rounds, so even if you miss the first round you can come and ... It's going to be on Twitch. You can smack talk. You can help us if you know anything at all about React Native or Native Script. I wanted to call it Native Tools again.

Samantha Geitz: Yes, it will be a very fun time. Spicy meatball of a time. You should tune in.

Matt Stauffer: I feel better about this being less nepotistic because they planned this entire thing without me even knowing it was happening, and they literally planned the first one during my son's pre-school graduation so I won't even be there. I'm going to tune in after the fact and hear how it went. I actually am disconnected from this, I promise.

Samantha Geitz: You making it sound like we did it on purpose. We didn't want Matt there so we planned it during Ky's preschool.

Matt Stauffer: It's not my thing that I'm pretending to not be ... I actually wasn't there for the planning so it's just going to be a nice surprise for me as well.

Samantha Geitz: It'll be a nice surprise for all of us. It's going to be ... We're winging it y'all don't judge us too harshly, unless it goes well in which case, yeah, you can ...

Matt Stauffer: We totally knew what we were doing. Right? Okay, anything else you want to plug or talk about or share?

Samantha Geitz: Nope not really. Follow me on Twitter.

Matt Stauffer: If people want to follow you, yeah, how do they follow you?

Samantha Geitz: Yes, Twitter fame, I told you. It's @samanthageitz which G-E-I-T-Z I'm assuming also you probably will see my name in your little ...

Matt Stauffer: Put it in the show notes, yeah.

Samantha Geitz: Podcast thing. It's a lot of ... can I say, shit posting. Can you beep it out?

Matt Stauffer: You can say shit posting.

Samantha Geitz: Shit posting. I'm like people listen to this-

Matt Stauffer: That's our cuss for the episode.

Samantha Geitz: I haven't. Have you noticed I didn't Matt? I was trying really hard not to swear on the Laravel podcast.

Matt Stauffer: I know I was really proud of it.

Samantha Geitz: Yes. I have the filthiest mouth at Tighten. I haven't been reprimanded and I still feel like it's a thing. I also was told that I'm the bro-iest brogrammer at Tighten which is now part of my Twitter.

Matt Stauffer: That is most certainly true.

Samantha Geitz: Bro I would crush some code.

Matt Stauffer: Right, our single cuss down at the end of the podcast. I think I'll probably let this one slip through.

Samantha Geitz: Yes.

Matt Stauffer: All right Samantha, this was a ton of fun as always. I loved it. Thank you so much for giving us some of your time and your story and we will all see you at the Battle for React and Vue and whatever all that stuff.

Matt Stauffer: Welcome back to a special edition of the Laravel Podcast season three. It's season three but it feels like season two. Stay tuned.

[music]

Matt Stauffer: Welcome back to a special edition of the Laravel Podcast. This is season three but I wouldn't hold it against you if you got surprised because I have two guests with me. Not only do I have two guests but I have the OG two guests. Can you guys say hello to the people?

Jeffrey Way: Hey, everybody. I'm Jeffrey Way. Good to be back.

Taylor Otwell: I'm Taylor Otwell.

Matt Stauffer: You may have heard of Taylor. We got Jeffrey Way, the creator of Laracasts and bringer of many of us to Laravel and then Taylor Otwell, OG Laravel Podcast, OG Laravel. We figured it's time for a little bit of a breather in season three with all these episodes and just catch up and see how the crew is doing and catch up on things. Stuff we've got on our plate for today is definitely talking about how Laracon is looking for this year, what's going on with the development of Laravel and Laracasts and everything like that.

I figure the easiest and most concrete thing for us to talk about is Laracon. What is going on? How is ticket sales? How is speaker lineups? How's the venue looking? How's Chicago looking? How's everything going for Laracon right now.

Taylor Otwell: I think it's going pretty well. The venue is the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago which is a really large museum. On the South side of Chicago. We'll be in their auditorium and the ticket sales are going really good. We already sold out. That's about 850 attendees, about 50 of those attendees are going to be speakers and sponsors and then around 800 of them are going to be actual ticket purchasers from the community. This will definitely be the biggest US Laracon. It'll probably be the biggest Laracon yet so far.

Although Laracon EU is usually a little bigger, so I wouldn't be surprised if they sold more tickets this year. I'm pretty excited about it. All the speakers are pretty much lined up. Some of the big name speakers that people may have heard of so far. Of course, I'll be there. Creator of Laravel, Evan You creator of Vue will be there. Uncle Bob Martin who's famous for writing some very popular programming books and just being a programming teacher will be there. Ryan Holiday, the author of several books that people may have heard of.

His latest book is called Conspiracy but he also wrote The Daily Stoic, Perennial Seller, Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy. Some pretty popular books actually. Who else? Adam Wathan will be there. Several other community members will be there. I'm really looking forward to it. I think it's going to be a great talk. Right now, what I'm working on is just ironing out food, drinks, all those extra things you have to do for a conference. T-shirts, about to order those probably. Sponsors, we'll have 11 sponsor tables at the venue.

We have quite a few sponsors again this year. It's going to be a packed house.

Jeffrey Way: I always wonder how you keep track of everything.

Matt Stauffer: Yes, me too.

Jeffrey Way: Do you ever get close to the conference and think, "Oh, my god. I didn't even do that yet?"

Taylor Otwell: One way I--

Matt Stauffer: Do you have a checklist?

Taylor Otwell: One way I keep track is I have a spreadsheet from last year with every expense. That actually serves as a checklist. Like, "Hey, badges are on here as an expense. I should probably order those for this year." I just duplicate that every year and then I type in the new expenses and it also serves as a projection for profit and loss on the whole conference. It serves a dual purpose as a checklist and as a profit estimator for how the conference is looking to make sure I'm not way overspending. Especially, on speakers this year.

We've spent probably $50,000 on speakers this year just because we several speakers that have a speaking fee and then we try to pay every speaker at least a few thousand dollars to make sure they're not just losing money coming to the conference which can happen. I don't know if you've spoken at conferences. As a listener, you may know that often it's a breakeven or maybe even a losing affair. Trying to make it somewhat worthwhile.

Jeffrey Way: I've been to some where you don't get anything and that's just how it is. Look, you can come and speak but we're not giving you a penny.

Taylor Otwell: [chuckles] I feel like I usually lose money.

Matt Stauffer: That's most of them.

Jeffrey Way: I used to go to a lot of WordPress conferences. What were they called back then? WordCamp?

Taylor Otwell: Yes, WordCamp.

Jeffrey Way: Maybe. With them is like they just don't have the money. They don't have the budget. You're doing that all on your own dime, if you want to go.

Matt Stauffer: I'm looking through this list of speakers. There's quite a few people who I don't know of, but I've heard you guys talk about them. Jocelyn Glei, maybe? Ryan Holiday, you've mentioned him being an author. Then, there's one other person who I didn't know. Who do I not know? I guess it's just them.

I think everyone else here is either, Jason Freed or Bob Martin or Evan Yu or people who are pretty reputable members of the Laravel community. Although we do have a few first-time speakers, TJ Miller, Caleb Porzio, Colin DiCarlo are all speakers--

Taylor Otwell: Collin DiCarlo is not.

Matt Stauffer: He's not-- Geez, I thought he was--

Taylor Otwell: No. I think he's a 2016 Louisville speaker.

Matt Stauffer: That was the year I was at home with the baby, so my bad. Caleb and TJ. Jocelyn, you mentioned Ryan. He's written a couple books. I need to go check those out. Can you tell us a little bit about Jocelyn?

Taylor Otwell: Jocelyn runs a podcast called Hurry Slowly where she talks about work, productivity, burn-out, stuff like that. She's actually interviewed Jason Freed on the podcast. She also wrote a book called Unsubscribe which is on Amazon. You can check out. It's just about the overabundance of notifications and busy-ness that's prevalent in our tech world especially. I think she's going to talk about similar topics at the conference. I entirely forgot Jason Freed would be there. That's kind of a big deal. [laughter] I've been so busy with other stuff.

Matt Stauffer: Let me ask you. Do you guys feel overwhelmed sometimes by all of the work you have to do? Do you feel that you can manage it fairly well day-to-day?

[crosstalk]

Jeffrey Way: I'm often overwhelmed by the work on my plate. My life is a constant battle of trying to figure out whether I'm overwhelmed because I don't have everything settled on my side or whether it's because we need to readjust the company a little bit. There's always a the, "Oh, Dave quit and he used to do all this high-level administration stuff so I took on all of his jobs for a while. We need to hire a new Dave." That was the thing for the longest time.

"Oh, we've got four more developers than we did a year ago so there's a lot more management" or "This one client is requiring all these needs." Sometimes, it's process stuff. Sometimes, it's just I need to stop screwing around in my free time and actually, work through my email backlog, or I need to figure out how to handle my tasks better. Right now, I'm actually doing really good. It's because I've spent the last couple of weeks really putting in a concerted effort.

We also have hired someone who is not joining us until mid-May, who's going to take probably a third of my job off my plate. It's funny because I was actually-- That whole thing, there was this guy, Dave, who managed all this. A lot of those responsibilities are going to be back off my plate soon, so I'm getting to that point. I usually can tell, "Do I finish my day with an empty email inbox and a task list with a couple items left on it and a clean desk? Do I finish my day with 70 emails still in my inbox, 20 things in my task list, a big pile of paper on my desk." Usually, those are the signs for me of, "Am I struggling to keep up, or am I actually on top of my life?"

Matt Stauffer: What about you, Taylor?

Taylor Otwell: I was just thinking I feel less overwhelmed by the work, and more overwhelmed by the expectations of everything. Because I don't really have that much I have to work on every single day, like Forge is going to run so I just have to answer the emails. It's a little different, I guess, because you probably want to crank out videos. I don't know what your schedule is and then, Matt probably has his daily tasks.
For me, it's this expectation of somewhere out in the future, I have to do something impressive again.

Matt Stauffer: Do something amazing.

Taylor Otwell: I have to get up on stage and speak about it and it has to not fail. That's the pressure I feel really-- weighs on me every day, basically, because at Laracon, there has to be something cool to unveil, which, nobody panic, we are working on something but things can come up, or problems can arise. It could be buggy, it may not be finished in time, and that stuff's really overwhelming, more so than just the daily routine.

Like Laracon itself could-- There's expectations there for it not to suck, for people to have a good time, for the food not to be terrible, for the speakers to do well, all that stuff is high expectation, too.

Matt Stauffer: Had you guys seen the grid of urgent versus important? I'm trying to remember who it is, but somebody from a long time ago, basically, drew a grid and any given thing that's on your plate as a pressure should be doing can be urgent or not urgent, and important or not important. The really interesting thing is that you can put all the things that are pressing on you into that grid and figure out which of the quadrants they find themselves in.

The things we're mostly like to do that are most wasteful is the urgent and not important. The things we're least likely to do that sounds like, really, what's on your plate a lot, Taylor, is the important and not urgent. It's the things that don't have that immediate time pressure but are the most important. It sounds like a lot of your life is important but not urgent which I know those are the hardest things to have the discipline, the focus on. Is that something where you have developed practices to make sure you're not just letting that stuff slip?

Taylor Otwell: Past couple of years it's been trying to start really early on stuff like Horizon and then the thing I'm working on for this year's Laracon. I don't know. I do agree because Mohammad's going to take care of a lot of Forge stuff for me. I don't really spend a lot of time working on those features lately. I would say yes, you're right, it is important but not urgent. That is a challenging spot to be in.

Jeffrey Way: Plus you have so many products. I wonder does it ever get to the point where you think "Well, I'd love to do another one but I just don't have the capacity to maintain yet another project"

Taylor Otwell: Yes. There is a sense of when do you say "I did what I set out to do." This is what success is, basically. I should just maintain what I have and be happy that it got this far and not really try to overwhelm myself with a new impressive thing year after year because-- Most people will never reach the popularity of something like Laravel ever. I should just enjoy that maybe and not really try to stress out about creating the next big thing all over again, every single year. Which I think there's some merit to that as well but people don't really like that I guess [laughs].

Matt Stauffer: It's a little bit of the Apple thing, right? Is a WWDC where they don't completely blow your mind an acceptable WWDC? I would say "Yes man, I'm happy with what I've got. Just don't break it".

Taylor Otwell: Yes. I remember Steve Jobs saying not to compare Laravel to Apple in any way really but he said something like most companies are lucky to ever invent one amazing product, They had invented the iPhone, the mac itself was amazing and then iPhone and iPod and all the stuff that came with it. I don't know. At some point, there's only so much you can do. I'm going to keep trying this year we'll see.

Matt Stauffer: Jeffrey, what about you?

Jeffrey Way: I'm okay right now but it's more of the anticipatory type of thing because my wife's pregnant so we're going to having a second child. We're not going to be having two children. Matt, I know you have more experience with that than me but it's stressing me out a little bit. Then, also this is the first year I've been working with a UI guy. I don't know what you call him, a designer or UX, I don't know what the terminology is anymore but he's doing really great work but every time he cranks out something new it ads to the backlog of stuff I have to implement, which I'm very thankful for but I'm kind of anticipating an insane amount of work in the next five months.

I was just curious how you guys handle it. Then, there's also that thing where I worry sometimes when you feel stress and anxiety it's like to some extent you're creating it yourself and it's hard to determine, is this something I'm just doing myself and I am entirely in control of or are you not in control of it? That's something I think about a lot. Is there a way to turn that switch off when you need to? I don't know.

Matt Stauffer: I know that you have at least some, like talking about that urgent versus not urgent thing. I know you have some urgency because there's this expectation of a certain timeline for delivering videos. Are there a lot of things on your plate, for work, that are in the longer terms? You mentioned one thing being the implementation in the UI. I know that you do visual refreshes occasionally, although in your latest podcast you talked about how a lot of that was early days and it probably will be a little bit less the case going on where you feel like you're getting more of a handle on things. Do you have a lot of things that are in the longer term bucket? Or are most things still locked in the immediate video production timeline?

Jeffrey Way: Most is in the immediate. The UI work we're doing will probably be next year or at the end of this year. That's probably the most long-term work thing I'm doing. Most of it is immediate. It's very difficult to crank out content all of the time. Sometimes if I go even four days without something new I will get a tweet or somebody is complaining. It's like, you have to understand I've been doing this for three years, there's like thousands of videos. At some point, I'm going to have trouble thinking of new stuff to cover. I'm amazed every week I'm able to, I'm not complimenting myself, but I'm amazed th I'm able to think of something to publish every single week but that does wear on me a little bit to finding things to cover every week.

Matt Stauffer: I hit episode 100 of the 5 Minute Geek Show and I just was like you know what I've talked for 10 to 15 minutes at a time for about 100 episodes and I don't have anything else stuff to say. People keep saying bring it back. I'm like--

Jeffrey Way: Yes and I think that's-- Have you close that down? Is it done?

Matt Stauffer: It's not over. It's just on the hiatus. It's on hiatus until I come up with something else to say. You know what I mean?

Jeffrey Way: Yes.

Matt Stauffer: I'm not saying it's over because I'm sure that moment will come again, but right now, I'm just like, "I don't have anything else to say." If I felt that pressure like you do, to keep saying things, man-- granted, everytime the new tech comes out you can choose to go learn that tech and go to it. There's some things you can reach for, but still, I totally identify with what you're saying. It's just at some point, I just might not have anything else to teach right now. [laughs]

One real quick, on ask for a pro tip, two kids. The big shift for two kids for me-- Taylor, I want to hear if you have the same perspective as-- With one kid, there's always the possibility for one parent to be taking care of the kid and the other parent being an adult. With two kids, there's now-- Even if one parent takes care of the kid, the other parent is taking care of another kid. All of a sudden, those rests that you get-- What I can imagine is, once you have three kids, it's even crazier. Because now, all of a sudden, there's never a one on one.
That was the big shift that I noticed with the second kid was. Let's say, the other parent is feeding the baby or something like that, you're not cleaning up, you're taking care of a three-year-old or whatever else it ends up being. That's the biggest shift for me for a second kid.

Jeffrey Way: Sounds stressful.

Matt Stauffer: [laughs] It's not that bad. It's just a perspective shift, I think.

Jeffrey Way: I have heard one bonus is that, like in your case, Matt, your oldest probably helps entertain your youngest quite a bit more, whether or not, depending upon you and your wife at all times for entertainment.

Matt Stauffer: The older she gets, the more they play with each other and the more moments we get where they're playing together in the toy room for 45 minutes. We go, "Oh, my gosh." We sat down and had an adult conversation. That's definitely, definitely a boom. All right, that's what's going on with Laracon. You said the tickets are already sold out. Do you have a waiting list like you have previous years, Taylor?

Taylor Otwell: There's not really an official waiting list right now. As people email me, I actually do put their name in a little file. I have sold a few tickets that way, but there hasn't been a lot of cancellations lately. There's not really any tickets to give out right now, anyway.

Matt Stauffer: Got it, all right. I have a couple questions, but before we do that, let's talk Laracasts real quick. What kind of stuff have you-- let's say, anybody who hasn't been to Laracast for a little while, what have you been covering? What's your latest technologies that you've been looking at? Is there anything exciting you want to share with people?

Jeffrey Way: Yes, sure. Let me take a look. Been doing a bunch of things lately. I finally covered Laravel Echo in full. Somehow, that was one of the things that I just missed a year ago. I went through that top to bottom. I think if you're intrigued by that, on how to communicate with the client, I think that would be really useful. It's a series called Get Real With Laravel Echo. Some things, I just have to refresh. That's one of the worst parts of my job is, even if it's from 2014 and it still works, it's like, there's just a few differences where you sort of have to record it all over again. That's the worst part of my job.
Other than that, one of the things we're working on right now which I'm excited about, it's a series called How To Read Code. The whole point is not for me to write code, it's to work through the process of how you learn from the code that other people have written. There's that phrase about, "If you want to become better as a developer, you have to--" I can't remember what it is. You have to read a lot of code, you have to write a lot of code, and you have to learn, I guess.

A lot of times, I think young people really get into the learning phase where they're reading the books and they're watching the videos, but they're not actually taking enough time to read code that other people have written. I notice that's sometimes a black box. People are afraid to dig behind the scenes and learn how these things are constructed, so they stay away from that. Then, also, they end up not writing as much code as they should, because they don't know what to build. This is the thing that comes up a lot. I learned this from students, is they don't know what to build. They haven't been hired yet, they're trying to think of projects they can flex their muscles on, and they have no idea where to start.

With the How To Read Code, Taylor, we're actually going through the Laravel.com source code. I haven't told you about this.

Taylor Otwell: Nice.

Jeffrey Way: We're just pulling it up on GitHub, and we're figuring out every step, like, "Okay, if there's this repository for the markdown files, well, how is this project getting access to those markdown files and how is reading it and parsing it and replacing the URLs? How is versioning being handled?" What's fun about it is I don't have any experience with that codebase, so it's how I would exactly figure out how things are constructed. It seems like the feedback's been pretty good.

Once again, I think, for so many, it's a black box. You're kind of scared to dig in because you don't know where to start. I encounter this a lot, so I hope it's useful. Then, other than that, I've been working with this UI guy. It's been fun because most of the time, I do things myself. That's a lot of coding in the browser, writing a lot of CSS and zeroing in on something that doesn't look horrible, which I'm not very good at. He is so much more systematized. He has me set up with this-- what is this app called? Marvel? Are you guys familiar with this? Marvelapp.com. It's new to me. It's amazing. He'll share a link with me and it's like an interactive website where he can swap things out, he can show me interactions and animations. Then, once I signed off on it, he sends me a link to this Mac app called Zeplin, zeplin.io. It's amazing because I'm so used to-- When extracting designs, I use Photoshop. If there's some SVG, I have to cut it out and save it as SVG.

Very hard, creating new layers all the time. With this, everything is just clickable. If I need a particular icon, I click on it, and there's a button that says "Save as SVG." This is all new to me. I don't have any experience with tools like this. It's been a huge benefit to me in the last couple of months. I love it.

Matt Stauffer: It's very cool. I'm going to try and go back through, listen to this, put all this in the show notes, everybody. Well, real quick going on with me. I'm updating Laravel, up and running for 5.5, so that's exciting. We finally got approval - actually, 5.5 or 5.6, I'm not sure I remember. I think we might be doing 5.6. I was going to do LTS and I think we've picked 5.6. Finally got my editors to sign off in doing that. I've got Wilbur Powery, who's doing some of the groundwork for me, and just reading through all the change logs, and making a list of all the things that are out of date, so that I don't have to do that work, so that he can just give me that list, and I'm going to sit down and write.

The hope is for that to be some time in the fall for us to have edition two, so that's fun. I just left a project where I had been writing code, basically, for 20 to 30 hours a week on top of doing my normal job at Tighten just because we had a project that hit a point where no BLs was available. I felt that I just needed to fish it out. That's part of why I'm feeling so good right now because I'm going back to being a real boy again. [laughs] I'm not going to make any promises I keep making like, "I'm going to blog again. I'm gonna newsletter again." I'm actually feeling this possibility, especially when that new employee joins in May that I might actually start being a human again. I have said that at three or four times since my daughter was born two years ago and it hasn't happened yet. Who knows? Maybe that day will come.

Jeffrey Way: That's great. It's great news.

Matt Stauffer: Yes. That's very exciting. Okay, so I have a topic for us to talk about. I didn't prep you guys for this, so sorry about that. There's a couple of topics of conversation that have been coming up really recently at Tighten about - and if anybody listens to Twenty Percent Time podcast, you'll know at least a little bit about this. Talking about JavaScript versus PWAs versus straight Blade apps versus Blade apps that have some JavaScript components.

First off the bat, before we go to the deeper conversation, I want to talk about PWAs. I want to see, have you guys dug into that at all? The iOS has just pushed out some of the core features that would make it so that you can actually write a PWA and have it work on iOS. This is the first day where you can actually even realistically consider building one that would work on the most modern devices. It's like when Flexbox first finally actually worked versus like, "This has been a thing for a while."

We haven't written any production PWAs for anybody, but it's finally a point where we're like, "We can." Is that something you guys have dug into that you're even interested in or is it like, "Hey, it just became legitimate a week ago, so now, maybe, I'll put my brand on it"?

Jeffrey Way: Yes. Beyond a blog post or two, I have no experience with that at all. Like you said, it's always tricky. Do I try and invest my time in this if I can't use it too much yet? It sounds like it's now becoming a possibility, but, for now, I have no experience at all.

Taylor Otwell: Yes. Me either.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. Well, I have no experience other than I did a whole bunch of research to write that blog post, November 9.

Jeffrey Way: Right. It's one of the ones I read [chuckles].

Matt Stauffer: Yes. Nine months ago I did all that and then, basically, I said, "I'm going to go build some." Then, I discovered that it didn't even work on iOS, and I said, "Well, maybe I'll hit pause and all that until iOS supports it." They do, and I know that Keith, who works at Tighten, has been doing a lot more thinking about that than I have. I've been pushing him to-- with all his copious free time he's on at this point, he and Samantha are nearly as busy as I am - to see if he can do a part two write-up now that it's viable. I'll see if he can do that.

Jeffrey Way: I'm curious to what extent it's viable. In the latest browsers, that's the idea?

Matt Stauffer: Yes. Basically--

Jeffrey Way: What's the fallback look like? I wonder.

Matt Stauffer: In theory, PWA should work on fallback browsers. In theory, it's not like it's not going to work, but it's more like it's just going to be a website with JavaScript versus the value that a PWA is going to provide. You don't want to really go hole-hogging to something, expecting it's going to be a PWA where people can use it offline, they can use it when their internet goes out, it's going to save stuff, stuff like that, and then have it not work on the major browsers.

We're basically at a point where all the major mobile browsers are going to be little work with it. I don't know what the whole mobile Opera situation is like because I haven't dug into that. I know that we're at a point where literally all iPhone users couldn't even use PWAs up until a week ago. It was very non-viable up until a little bit ago. Now, your mobile Chrome, and your mobile Safari, and all those are all possible to use it. The biggest thing with the PWA is just it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work, and it's a lot of learning, and it's a lot of different ways of thinking about things because you're having to make things, basically, function regardless of whether or not the internet is there. It's that biggest shift in perspective over anything else. There's a lot of complexity in architecture that you need to introduce to make that happen. The good thing is, people are building tooling to make that easier, but it's something where you're not going to do it unless the client definitively needs it.

I can imagine maybe you eventually building a Laracast PWA if you really wanted to so people could go on a Laracast, open up the PWA in their phone, in their iPad, and then tap the seven videos they want to download so they can watch them on a plane or something like that. That might be the possibility for it. But I still think the vast majority websites won't be PWAs because it's cost and you got to be sure that you're actually getting the benefit. Like you said, if most major browsers can't use it, then you're not going to get that benefit. We're now to the point where most major browsers could get the benefits so people should start learning about it. But again, it's just really early days right now.

Jeffrey Way: Okay. Yes, I find in general, most of the apps I build are that combination you said. A little Blade, a little Vue, sometimes they're interconnected, that and something that the sort of apps I build. Although I find it gets tricky. I find that I do want to reach for something a little different. I do sometimes feel like, "If I just built this as an SPA entirely, this would be a lot cleaner." I think a lot of Laravel developers probably end up in the same boat where you're trying to do both at the same time.

It gets tricky because you often end up reproducing the same logic in two different locations: one for the comments side and one for your back end. I think it's a common thing developers in our space are going through right now.

Matt Stauffer: That's the second part of this conversation so I'm glad you transitioned to it. We're having this internal chat where Daniel Coborn is basically saying, "Look, most of the sites were hired to do or eventually are going to have some JavaScript so why don't you just go whole hog in the first place?" Caleb is saying, "I want to build Blade apps that have little widgets, and I'd rather explicitly do all the work in my controller and then pass it in these props to the Vue, which is when it comes up." I'm saying, "I want to do all Blade until I find a definitive need the JavaScript's going to happen. When that happens, then I'll modify it the way it should be.

We have this kind of continue or whatever. We chose as a different side. I wanted to hear from you guys. If you were to start a new app today, are you in the world where you say, "You know what? I'm going to do Blade and then I'll modify it." Are you in the world where you're like, "You know what? I'm just going to do single-page app all the way." Or are you somewhere in between? Jeffrey just answered a little bit so I guess Taylor, what's your approach right now?

Taylor Otwell: The latest thing I wrote which hasn't been unveiled yet, I did basically build it as a single-page app using Vue and Vue Router. Honestly, I really like it. I think Vue Router is pretty nice and easy to use. I think for this particular use case, it just solved the bunch of problems that we would have had trying to make it all Blade. I feel like my use cases, both times I've interacted with Vue Router, which is Horizon as a single-page app, basically, and the new thing. But then, there are unique situations where I wasn't having to duplicate a lot of rules on the front end. Either you authenticated to view the whole thing or you're not.

There wasn't a bunch of other authorization that had to happen for various little features. That made it a little simpler, I feel like, to build it as a single-page app because I wasn't having to duplicate a bunch of junk. But if I was going to build something like Forge as a single-page app, I probably would have a little more duplication on various things. I don't know, man. I see Daniel's point to an extent that it does feel good to just go whole hog and embrace it because it feels nice to do it all in JavaScript if you go down that path. I don't know. I think Caleb's point, I feel that pain most often on authorization. I feel like than anything else.

Jeffrey Way: Yes, absolutely. Matt, I'm curious about your point. Because I have seen a bit of a backlash to JavaScript in general, where people think, "Okay, you're getting some extra interactivity but the complexity you introduce to make all of these work is sometimes insane." Just the fact that Mix has to exist to make that build process somewhat easy to understand, shows how complicated this stuff can be. I understand exactly what Taylor's saying but I also get the angle of, "Let's put this off as far as we possibly can." Has your thinking on that changed in the last year?

Matt Stauffer: Yes. I would say that I love Vue, I love React, I love single-page apps when they're appropriate. I think that knowing what a lot of projects Daniel has spanned recently, and that type of thing that I know Taylor is working on right now. I would pick SPA. I pick Vue Router SPA and I'd pick an API first in that context but I think that we can do that and we can then assume that that is always the right way to go forward. To me, that's not the case at all because of what you just said. I think testing is harder. I think debugging is harder. I think NPM and all the node modules issues breaks more. I think the entire complexity of this system is significantly higher. I think onboarding new developers in the system is more complicated and I want to make sure that it's not because I know PHP better than I know Javascript.
I've been writing Javascript for as long as I've been writing PHP. Granted I haven't been writing React and Vue as long as I've been writing Laravel. I think I understand them relatively well and just the whole system everything is more complex than an all Javascript app. I am willing to make that statement and so to me-

Taylor Otwell: The testing is definitely more complex.

Jeffrey Way: Yes.

Matt Stauffer: Yes. So to me, if I'm in a place where I can accomplish it with Blade then I'm not going to introduce any Javascript. If I can accomplish with Blade and the occasional Javascript widget then I'm going to use it with Blade and the occasional Javascript widget. That doesn't mean I don't believe that there are plenty of apps that are better as all Javascript or maybe even not using Vue Router or whatever but like a Javascript page that navigates to another Javascript page so you're doing your React containers or whatever else it ends up doing. I'm 100% on board with that possibility but I need to be convinced that that's the way to do it before I go there.

Jeffrey Way: Taylor, for the SPAs you're building, when it comes to testing, are you doing endpoint testing for your backend code? In addition to that, how much client-side testing are you doing? Do you have tons of [crosstalk]

Taylor Otwell: I wrote all of the endpoint test and there's hundreds of them for a new project and then we haven't even written the front end test yet, mainly because I'm working with other people on this. Of course, I have Steve, my designer, and then I have another person working on front-end stuff. It's also complicated by the fact that this is a package, it's not an app that Dusk is really easy to pull in to and so we haven't really toyed around with making Dusk work in a package environment yet. I don't know what Dusk's going to look like. We may end up using some kind of Javascript solution.
There's just so many little subtle interactions on the front-end that are going to be one, important to test and two, hard to test I think. I don't know, we'll see I haven't gotten there yet.

Jeffrey Way: Yes, I'm curious to see how you figure that out.

Taylor Otwell: I would like to pull dusk in and just use it to test the package. Ideally kind of like the test bench for the back end which I used to write all my endpoint tests. Hopefully something similarly -- we can do something similar to that with Dusk, we'll see.

Matt Stauffer: I hadn't thought about that because I was like, "Oh yes, Javascript just use Java--" but it's not, it's multiple pieces. We have found that once you put the work into the Javascript testing if that thing is full-on Javascript you can get it to be tenable? I feel like Javascript testing is, in our world, is probably the next great hurdle for us to make simple for people. Basic Laravel testing was one hurdle and then, what do you call it?, your package Jeffrey that was eventually pulled in the core like application testing that was the next hurdle.

Gulp was a hurdle and Mix was a hurdle. These are hurdles where they're really complicated things that we look at and said, "You know what? People in the community are needing this to be simpler" and someone sat out usually one of the two of you sat out to make it a lot easier. I know that there's at least two people talking at Laracon about testing. Testing in Javascript and stuff like that. I'm super excited about the possibility that -- I thought there's two. I know that Samantha is at least. Her talk is about full-stack testing strategies.

The reason for this is because at Tighten we're always asking this question of, what are our different ways of testing the whole way up and down the stack? Samantha's our resident React guru and we've had quite a few React developers at this point but she's the lead in thinking there and she's been asking this question a lot of like, "What does testing look like?" what I told her was like, "I'm going to wait until you give this talk to demand this of you of you but I want you to make it really easy for me and any app to write a Javascript test"

I know Dusk and I know Laravel and PHPUnit but I want you to make it super easy for me. I'm hoping that that's what her talk is going to do for me and for everybody else. No pressure, Samantha. [laughs]

Jeffrey Way: That would be great. I think so many times developers don't think about that. I think maybe they get too deep in the woods thinking, "okay, this is quite you have to do. You got to get this and this and this and this and this and then pull in these 8 dependencies then you're ready to go." They forget that to a newcomer that's horrible it's so frustrating. The view test utils library works great but just to get to the point where you can start writing your first test it's a lot of work.

In many cases like this, it's not spotlighting them specifically but in so many cases like this you find situations where, "This could be significantly easier to get started" and it's not a badge of honor that you have to go through so many hurdles to write your first test, it should be easier.

Matt Stauffer: I like that as a metric. I would like to have the ability to write a Reactor Vue test out of the gate. The same way that with a new Laravel app, I can write a test out of the gate without. I literally open up example test and just change some letters and I'm writing my test, that's brilliant.

That was not what writing tests in PHP unit used to be like. It's not as if PHP unit is easy to bootstrap but Taylor and company did the work to make that easy, and you did the work to make it easy with application testing upon the core. I'm hopeful that we're we're moving in that direction.

Alright. JavaScript, backends, Laracon , Laracasts, Laravel up and running. What are you guys learning these days? Are there any books you're reading? I know Taylor you've been talking about stoicism a lot. I started that one book, the really old one is it Marcus Aurelius or something like that?

Taylor Otwell: Yes.

Matt Stauffer: I started the book and I'm just moving really slowly through it. Could you could you give me the TLDR elevator pitch for stoicism? Is that is that possible?

Jeffrey Way: What is stoicism?

Matt Stauffer: Yes. What is stoicism, Taylor?

Taylor Otwell: I think the one-sentence thing is this? It reminds me of that serenity prayer, I don't know if you ever heard that where stoicism is very focused on not worrying at all about the things that are out of your control. They define the things that are in your control as only your own boss, basically. Your health is not in your control, your job is not really, it's influenced by external factors.
That was a little confusing to me at first because some things, say you're in a tennis match and you're facing someone, and whether you win or not is partly in your control, but it's partly not. I was always confused by that from a stoic perspective.

There was one book that helped me resolve that situation, where it was like, You want to internalize your goals a little bit. To succeed at the tennis match is basically to give it your best so to speak. Whether you win or lose, is out of your control at that point, but you're still succeeding as long as you prepare and practice to give it your best shot.
That's the main gist of Stoicism is not worrying about anything that's out of your control. Only worrying about the things you actually can control. Everything revolves around that.

Matt Stauffer: I like that.

Taylor Otwell: Basically Marcus Aurelius' book re-visits that theme a lot in various circumstances. One of the other popular stoic books, probably the other most popular Seneca's letters. He visits that topic on a variety of issues.

Death and dying, sickness, what it means to be wealthy, and be a stoic because he was pretty wealthy. Of course, Marcus Aurelius was the Emperor so he was extremely privileged and wealthy. I think Marcus Aurelius' book is surprisingly relatable for a Roman Emperor that lived 2,000 years ago. [laughter] A lot of the things he mentions struggling with are very relatable. I was surprised at how modern it all came across really for someone that you would think would be very disconnected from our life experience.

Matt Stauffer: Did I remember you saying something along the lines of Ryan Holiday, the guy who's speaking doing something about stoicism?

Taylor Otwell: Yes, he wrote the Daily Stoic which is a really popular book. There's 365 little chapters, every day it's like a little daily reading. He expounds on it in a couple paragraphs. It's a pretty cool little book.

Matt Stauffer: Cool.

Taylor Otwell: On the tech side what I've been looking into a lot recently is containers, AWS, deployment, stuff like that. Serverless stuff like AWS Lambda. I feel there's gold in those hills somewhere.

[laughter]

I just feel like it's not really being presented and packaged up in a very approachable way right now. Because AWS feels very low level, it gives you all the tools you need to make things happen but you still have to tie them together in pretty complicated ways to build something useful.

Probably the person that ties that kind of thing together the best is something like Heroku but just playing with some of those technologies. I think AWS Lambda is really cool. I really love the idea behind it, where basically you start out with just a function. By default, it's just like a JavaScript function that receives some arguments. You think of it like a little artisan command that receives a payload from the command line. You can invoke this function and pass it, little arguments. Then you can do whatever you want, you never really have to think about the underlying server. I think their concurrency limit is like 1000 concurrent tasks running at a time. It's pretty scalable for most situations, but you can actually do pretty interesting things like you can run a Laravel app on AWS Lambda which I actually did this week. I'm using some tutorials that people had written. It's a really interesting technology and like I said I feel like there's cool stuff there that just needs to be mined out, repackaged, and presented to people in this sort of digestible way. I've been trying to digest it myself and it's very complicated and there's actually a real lack of quality, like guides and documentation on how to do anything actually useful. There's lots of like, "Let's deploy a hello world" nginx page to elastic container service but how do I do zero downtime deployments reliably? How do I set up all my key workers reliably?" All that stuff is not there.

Jeffry: You guys are making me feel bad. I'm trying to think of what I'm learning right now and the answer is nothing. I can't think of anything.

Taylor Otwell: I've been playing Rocket League like an hour and a half a day.

[laughs]

Jeffrey Way: I think sometimes it's good to not always reach for something new but to get yourself in a habit of just a daily routine of every single day I'm going to chip away at this. There have been plenty of times where I'm really pushing my boundaries for a little bit trying to learn something new but I can't say that right now. I'm feeling horrible right now.

Matt Stauffer: I can tell you, Jeffrey, I'm not learning anything about code right now so don't feel horrible.

Jeffrey Way: Really?

Matt Stauffer: I'm learning things. Let me tell you the things I'm learning and I bet you you'll have something related. I'm listening to this woman, Esther Perel, who's this relationship expert. I'm listening to her stuff nonstop. My wife and I are both listening to all her stuff. It's really good. It's like this progressive thinking about relationships but every time I've listened or read to people who are talking about this type of relationship stuff they're like, "By the way, you should just have open relationships and be married to 20 people and have sex with all of them. It's no big problem." I'm like, "That's not me so much." But she has progressive thinking that kind of throws of some of the old croft that we brought along with us but stills very much focused on, "Well you're married to this person, stay married to this person." It's helpful. It's like opening up my mind a little bit. The other thing I'm thinking about is money. I may have talked to you guys a little bit I've been-
Jeffry: Yes, you're into that lately-

Matt Stauffer: I'm so into it. I just got obsessed with how much I hate having a mortgage. It became this massive thing for me. I literally just looked at my mortgage statement and I think this is it, beginning balance, applied balance, and ending balance. I lived in my house for I feel like several years now. It's atleast one year and it might be two years. I'm paying thousands of dollars a month towards my mortgage and I've applied $5,000 to my balance because I'm paying everything to the interest this whole time. I just feel like I'm in this awful system. You guys know this but I've been listening to these audiobooks. One of them is the millionaire one, what's it called? The Millionaire Next Door and then the other one is The Simple Path To Wealth and just focusing on like really simple investment strategies, really simple decisions you can make. I'm not going to talk about -- I could talk to you guys your ear off in the next half hour but to me, the two things I've been learning about are simpler, healthier approaches to money and investment. Then relationship stuff where it's kind of like helping you understand what kind of garbage you're bringing into your marriage or your relationship but in a way that is for the focus of you staying there, to that person long-term versus a lot of the other alternative. You know, half ways to thinking about it.

Jeffrey Way: I live everything you say on the finance stuff because you think the more you can simplify your financial situation the better it's going to improve your relationship as a result, too. I think it's the number one or the number two cause of fighting in relationships, is financial issues and of course, not everyone is in control of it. The more you can simplify your finances then and not buy a new car and instead buy an older car or something you can afford. The more you can simplify it, the better it's going to improve your relationship with your wife or your spouse and your kids. I see nothing but good things there. One thing I am doing, though -- This may interest you, Matt, when we had the Laravel podcast months ago I said, "Years ago I stopped playing guitar and the interest I had left" it's come back in the last couple of months.

Matt Stauffer: That's awesome.

Jeffrey Way: I know and I'm very happy about it. I went and bought a guitar and an amp. I've been playing lately. You can maybe see it in the back there and it's funny to see the parallels with code. I'm kind of getting in -- I'm approaching guitar from a more mature point of view, I guess. I'm getting more into this idea of like, "Okay, every single day I'm going to be working on this. I'm going to take a very fundamental approach to building up skills, whereas when I was a kid it was more, "I want to learn how to do this. Let's figure out how to do this as quickly as possible." Now, I take a very different approach to it, which I feel all of this parallels with code. It's very funny. I noticed on Twitter the other day a bunch of people were talking about how many coders have some interest in music or have some experience with music. It's interesting, the overlap there.

Matt Stauffer: I just read the intro to this Imposters Handbook thing that I tweeted out. I wish I could remember the guy's name because he's a well-known software author but he's talking about being a saxophone player. I remembered having read a book by him in the past where he is making a lot of those parallels. Do you know who that is what is?

Jeffrey Way: What is it? Hanselmann?

Matt Stauffer: It wasn't Hanselmann. He wrote one but then it was the one after that. You guys would definitely know who this guy is but I just remember that he had studied saxophone. I remember him talking about that in his book that I read but yes, who knows who wrote that. Anyway, I'm only a chapter into this Imposters Handbook but I like that.

Jeffrey Way: Very cool.

Matt Stauffer: We are at 50 minutes, which is usually when we start ramping it down. Is there anything else going on with you guys, anything you've been thinking about or learning or exciting about that you want to get a chance to chat about?

Taylor Otwell: Not for me that I haven't already discussed, I don't think. No, just what I already discussed but we're working on new Forge things, trying to make people's lives easier and Envoyer is getting redesigned, which it hasn't gotten since I originally wrote it in bootstrap, so that will be nice. Other than that, I think that's about it really on my end.

Jeffrey Way: Matt, can you share any news about who's coming up on the podcast?

Matt Stauffer: Oh man, I don't actually know who's next but let me go pull up my Trello board real quick. Basically what I'm trying to do is, I've been a little sneaky on this but I'm trying to mix up people who everybody knows, who everyone's been waiting for because every once in a while people are like, "Why has Adam not been in the podcast or whatever". I'm trying to mix up those people who I know that people are anxious about, for the people who they're not anxious about but I know that they're going to be really excited when they hear it. There's a couple of people who I know everybody want to hear and I'm trying to spread them out like every three or four guests and then be like, "Yes, but there's these other people that you don't know are super awesome." Some of my favorite responses have been people like, "I've never even heard that person's name before and now I want to be their best friend", I'm like, "Yes, I did my job well." Of course, the well-known names in Laravel are all going to get interviewed. I've got a list of dozens and dozens and dozens of people. I know that Adam's going to be coming up soon for sure and your Eric Barnes and your Chris Fidao's and them are going to be up in there, of course, as well and Freek and folks like that.
One of the things I did also, was I didn't interview anybody from Tighten because I didn't want to seem like it was nepotism, but there's quite a few really interesting people at Tighten, so I think the Tightenites are going-- I'm going to start slipping in some Tightenites and some Vehikl and Spatie folks. I'm going to start slipping in some of those folks as well too. There's a huge list, I mean, you guys, I could do dozens and dozens and dozens of more just from the list I originally spit out before even touching any of the suggestions I got on Twitter. There's a lot of good ones coming.

Jeffrey Way: I'm excited. It's been fun hearing from people that I'm not overly familiar with. I think that's a very wise choice you've made.

Matt Stauffer: I'm happy to hear it, I had so much fun. Of course, I miss you guys which is why we're back here for today. I figured we can do this one, every dozen or something like that, keep that lines of communication going.

Jeffrey Way: Yes. Cool.

Matt Stauffer: All right guys, feeling good. Anything else?

Jeffrey Way: That's it.

Matt Stauffer: It was a ton of fun talking to you guys and I can't wait to see you in a couple months. Until then, thanks for hanging out and we'll see you all later.

Matt:
All right, cool. All right. Welcome back to the latest episode of Laravel Podcast. It's been a little bit of a break for those of you who tune in to every new episode, but I've got another great interview here. As with every single one, I'm interested and excited to introduce someone to you. Some of you have heard of before, a lot of you might not know that she actually works in Laravel. Either way, it's going to be great.

This is Snipe. Although in my head, you have been Snipeyhead because I feel that's been your Twitter name for a while. Real name, Alison Gianotto, but I'm probably just going to end up calling you Snipe for rest of this call. Before I go in asking you questions, the first thing I want to do is just I always ask somebody, if you meet somebody in the grocery store who you know isn't technical at all, and they ask you, "What do you do?" What's the first way you answer that question?

Snipe:
I say I work with computers.

Matt:
Right, and then if they say, "My cousin works with computers and whatever." Where do you go from there?

Snipe:
Well, it depends on their answer. If they say, "Do you fix computers?" I'm like, "Not exactly." If they say, "Really? What type of computer work do you do?" I say, "Well, I'm a programmer." They're like, "So you make games?" "Well, not exactly." If they say something like, "Mobile apps or web? What languages?" Then I'm like, "Okay, now I can actually have a conversation." I don't do it to be disrespectful to the person asking. It's just confusing to them, and so I like to keep it bite-sized enough that no one gets confused.

Matt:
If you talk to a grandma in a store who doesn't have much exposure with computers, and you say, "Well, I work in InfoSec with blah-blah-blah." Then she's going to go, "Huh?" I totally hear you. If somebody does ask and they say, "You know what? I actually work in Rails," or, "I know what a framework is." How do you answer someone when they are more technical? Let's say, somebody-- You understand that this person is going to get all the names that you drop. Where do you go from there? How do you tell someone about what you do?

Snipe:
I actually usually say that I run a software company. I say, "I run a small software company that basically works on open source software." Usually, they look at me like, "How do you--"

Matt:
How do you make money?

Snipe:
Literally makes no sense.
[laughter]

Matt:
Which is where we're going to go. Let's actually go there. Snipe-IT, it's a company that has an open source product. I'm guessing that you make your money by paid support plans and hosting plans. Right? Then you also have the whole thing available for free in open source?

Snipe:
That's correct. Yes.

Matt:
Could you give us a little pitch for anybody who doesn't know what Snipe-IT is, and what it does, and who it's for?

Snipe:
I'm so bad at this. I'm the worst salesperson ever.

Matt:
Well, I'm helping you grow.
[laughter]

Matt:
Thirty seconds or less.

Snipe:
If you have any kind of a company and you buy assets like laptops, or desktops, or monitors, you need to keep track of them and you know who has what, what software is installed on what. Then usually I'm like, "I've got this nailed. I've got this nailed." Then I end up saying, "It's not a very sexy project, but people need it." [chuckles]

Matt:
Right, right, right. You have to justify yourself in your sales.

Snipe:
I know it. I really do. I'm really the worst at it. People get really excited. We're going to DEF CON this year like we usually do. I'm actually bringing my whole crew.

Matt:
Cool.

Snipe:
Because I really want them to be able to experience the way people react when they realize that we are Snipe-IT because they just get so excited. I've had people run across the conference floor to give me a hug that I've never met.

Matt:
Wow.

Snipe:
It's really cool. There was another time I was talking to, I think, YTCracker on the conference floor. He introduces me to one of his friends. He's like, "Yes, she's got a IT asset management software." He's like, "Really? I just heard about one of those. That was really great." I know exactly where this is going. I'm watching him look at his phone. He's like, "Yes, I just heard about it. It's really amazing. I think through your competition." I'm just sitting there smirking and I'm like, "Okay." Totally, I know exactly where this is going, but I let him spend five minutes looking it up on his phone. He's like, "It's called Snipe It?" I just look at him like, "Hi, I'm Snipe."
[laughter]

Snipe:
It was actually wonderful.

Matt:
It's one of the benefits not just of having the company, but actually naming it after yourself. You're like, "No. I'm actually the Snipe. That's me."

Snipe:
I'm excited to bring my crew out to DEF CON this year so they can really get to experience that first hand. Because like anything else in open source and in company support in general, a lot of times, you only hear the negative stuff. You hear about when something is broken or when something doesn't work exactly the way they want it to work. To actually get just random people coming up-- I'm getting us swag. I'm getting us t-shirts printed out. I'm super excited.

Matt:
I love it. There's nothing like having the opportunity to see the people who love what you're doing to really motivate you to go back and do it again. I hear that, for sure.

Snipe:
Definitely. Open source can be really tough with that because for the most part, the only thing that you're hearing is, "It doesn't work," or, "Why doesn't it do it do this thing?" Or people telling you how they think your software should work. To just get basically unbridled love, it really recharges me. It makes me want to work on a project even harder.

Matt:
Plus, the phrase unbridled love is just fantastic.
[laughter]

Matt:
It should be in our lexicon more often.

Snipe:
I agree.

Matt:
It's asset management software. I'm imagining I've got a 500-person company, and every single person gets issued a laptop within certain specs. After it's a certain amount of time old, then it gets replaced. We're going to make sure they have the latest build of whatever, Windows and the latest security patches, and that kind of stuff. It's at the point where you don't have-- My company has, I think, 17 people right now. There is just a spreadsheet somewhere.

This is when you get to the point where a spreadsheet is really missing people. People aren't getting their upgrades. People don't have security updates. My guess was the reason there was InfoSec involved in this at DEF CON is because security updates is a big piece of why that's the case. Did I assume right? Could you tell us a little bit more about how InfoSec and security are related to what you're doing here?

Snipe:
You're kind of right. We don't currently have a network agent, so we don't have anything that listens on the wire. We do have a JSON REST API, though. Basically, we're now working with folks like Jira, Atlassian, and we're going to be working with a JaMP API to try and basically make that stuff easier. I feel like its out of scope for us to try and build another networking agent, but we have an API.

If we can just build those bridges, then it just makes it a little bit easier. Ultimately, in terms of security, the real reason why I think people in InfoSec appreciate this tool, especially given the fact that we don't have-- And some people in InfoSec actually like the fact that we don't have a monitoring agent because that actually becomes a separate problem in and of itself. Let me give you a backstory on why I created this in the first place.

Matt:
Please do.

Snipe:
Maybe that'll help explain a little bit more. I was the CTO of an ad agency in New York City. We had grown from-- I think I was employee number 12, and we were now at 60 something people. We were using a Google Sheet shared between three IT people, some of which were not necessarily the most diligent-
[laughter]

Matt:
Sure.

Snipe:
-about keeping things up to date. Basically, when you've got a single point of truth that is no longer a single point of truth, it becomes a bit of a hellish nightmare. Additionally, if you're repurposing-- Because it's an ad agency, so you have a lot of turnover. You don't have any history on any particular asset if this asset is actually bad. If the hard drive on this is actually just bad and should be replaced. If this is bad hardware, then we should consider just unsetting it, and getting a brand new box, whatever.

We had to move offices. We were moving our main office and also our data center. Of course, when you're trying to move a 60-person company, and servers, and everything else, the very first thing that you have to do is to know what you have. That was an enlightening experience. It basically turned out that we had about $10,000 worth of hardware that we just didn't know where it was anymore.

Matt:
Wow.

Snipe:
People got fired. This is basically before I was a CTO and before I had set up the exiting process. People had been fired or had quit and just taken their laptops with them. That's got company data on it. That was a huge, huge issue for us. I was like, "Okay, we need something that we can integrate into our exit strategy or exit process to make sure that we're reclaiming back all of the data that--" Because some of those stuff is client data. It's actually really sensitive from a corporate perspective. Also, sometimes it's customer data. It was really important to have a way to handle that a bit better. That's it.

The asset part is the most important part of that software. We do have support for licenses where the cloud offering portion of that is not as fully developed. We're going to be building in a services section soon. That will describe, for example, if you had Snipe-IT as a vendor, where would we fit in this ecosystem for our customers? We don't actually have a good answer for that. We're going to be building out a services section that lets you know how much money you're paying every month, how many seats you have.

Matt:
That's great. That would cover not just global stuff, but also individual subscriptions like Adobe and PHP--

Snipe:
Sure, sure.

Matt:
Cool. That's awesome.

Snipe:
Licenses are really hard. They're hard because you can have-- One of our customers actually has a hundred thousand licenses.

Matt:
Oh, my Lord.

Snipe:
Because you've got this notion of a software license and then a bunch of different seats. There are some licenses that have one seat, and only one seat they only ever will. Then there are ones that have tens of thousands. For example, Microsoft Suite. If you have a large company, you're going to have a lot of those licenses. One of the things I care really deeply about in Snipe-IT, and I think one of the reasons why we've been successful in this really saturated marketplace, because it is a really saturated marketplace, is that I care a lot about the users' experience.

I know, for example, that our licenses section, the UI on that, the UX on that is not as optimized as it could be. That will be the next thing that we're really tackling is because it is a popular section. It's one that because of the nature of the variability of licenses, makes that a really tricky UX problem to solve. That's one of the things that I love about this work is getting to solve those kinds of problems.

Matt:
You're just starting to make me interested in this which means you're doing your job of the sales pitch. You said you got something you're super comfortable with.

Snipe:
[laughs]

Matt:
I always struggle-- Somebody made a joke and they said something like, "It's a drinking game for how many times Matt says 'I could talk about this for hours' during a podcast."

Snipe:
I did see that, yes.

Matt:
We're there already.
[laughter]

Matt:
I want to step back from Snipe-IT just a little bit. Snipe It, I want to call it Snipe It now that you said that.

Snipe:
Please don't call it that. [laughs]

Matt:
I won't, I promise. Think a little bit about what got you to here, and what got you to the point where you're a name and an online persona. I saw you had some interactions with @SwiftOnSecurity the other day. Everyone got all excited seeing the two of you interacting. What was the story? I want to eventually go back to when you got into computers in the first place. First, what was the story of the process of you going from just any other person on the Internet, on Twitter, on GitHub, or whatever to being a persona that is relatively well-known across multiple communities?

Snipe:
I can't really answer that for you because I don't really understand it myself. Other than lots of poop jokes--

Matt:
It's the best.

Snipe:
Yes. [chuckles] I think, probably, I've been on Twitter for a while. Also, I was on IRC for a long time. I think I'm still an op in the ##php channel on Freenode, although I don't visit there as often as I used to. I was really involved in that as I was learning PHP, and as I was helping other people learn PHP. I don't know. I've always been a mouthy broad, and I think that's probably worked because whether you like me or not, you remember me. [laughs]

Matt:
Yes, for sure.

Snipe:
I'm doing my very best to not swear on your podcast, by the way. I've caught myself at least five times that I'm like, "No, no, no." [laughs]

Matt:
If it happens, it happens but I appreciate it.

Snipe:
I'm doing my very best. I'm at a conference--

Matt:
Broad was a good one, yes. All right, exactly.

Snipe:
Yes, I know. Yes, exactly. I was like, "B-b-b-broad."

Matt:
[laughs]

Snipe:
Which is an offensive term in and of itself, but it's still-

Matt:
We toned it down a little.

Snipe:
-better than the alternative, I think.
[laughter]

Matt:
I love it.

Snipe:
I'm trying my best here, Matt.

Matt:
I appreciate it very much. Was it in the world of PHP? First of all, I heard longevity. I've been here for a while. That's always a big win. Poop jokes, that's also obviously big win. Give the people what they want.

Snipe:
I don't know if I can say dick jokes on your podcast.

Matt:
Well, you did. There we are.

Snipe:
Dick jokes are definitely big part of my repertoire. [laughs]

Matt:
Yes, I know. Being an interesting person, having been around for a while, but was it in PHP, and teaching PHP, and being around in the PHP world for a while, was that the main space where you came to prominence versus InfoSec, versus being open source business owner? Was it primarily in being a PHP personality where you came to at least your original knownness?

Snipe:
I think probably. Probably, yes. When I grab onto something, I don't let go of it. I've been doing some Perl work. I've probably started with Perl, but that was back in the days when I ran Linux as a desktop on purpose. [laughs]

Matt:
Oh, my goodness.

Snipe:
I was writing some Perl stuff. Heard about this this crazy thing called PHP which looked way easier and was way more readable, and ended up writing some-- Now, terribly insecure. I know this now, because it's like 2000, 2001, something like that. Which is for going back a ways. I had just started to put out stupid scripts like e-card scripts and things like that, because they served the need that I needed to have filled. This is a well-known secret, but I worked Renaissance Fairs for a very long time. I was guild member number four of the International Wenches Guild.

Matt:
What?

Snipe:
Yes. That's not even the most interesting thing I can tell you. Anyway, I was running their website Wench.org which now looks terrible because Facebook took over that community. I used to have interactive like sending roses to each other. Because in the Renaissance Fair community, different rose colors have different meaning. It's basically like an online greeting card thing with these built-in rose color meanings.

You could pick different colors of roses and send them to people that you liked, or people you didn't like, or whatever. Having this playground of a huge community of people who-- Basically, I would post to the forums. I'd say, "I'm thinking about building this. What do you guys think?" By the time they actually answered me, I had already built it anyway. I was just like, "This looks really interesting. I want to see if I can do this."

Matt:
To do it, yes.

Snipe:
Yes, exactly. It was really, really cool to have access to, basically, a beta-testing community that was super excited about anything that I put out. It definitely stoked the fires for me, stretching and doing things that I may not have done if I didn't have a reason to do it before.

Matt:
Well, I love how much passion plays a part there. Not this ill-defined like, "I'm passionate about programming. That means I spend all my free time doing it," but more like-- I've noticed that a lot of people who are a little bit older had PHP-- Actually, just developers in general which is quite a few people I've had on the show.

Matt:
You're going to burn the place down. I think those of us who started back when becoming a programmer wasn't necessarily going to make you big and rich. There's a little bit of that idea today. Go do a six-month boot camp, and then you're going to be rich or something. I think when a lot of us started-- I'm putting myself in that bucket, in the '90s and the '80s. When we started, it was because it was something that allowed us to do things we couldn't do otherwise. I don't know your whole back story, so I want to hear it, but a lot of the people I've noticed, "I was in the dancing community. I was in the video game community. I was in the Renaissance whatever Fair community."

Snipe:
I used to work on Wall Street. That was what I was doing before I got into computers. [laughs]

Matt:
Okay. Well, before I talk anymore, we need to talk about this. Tell me the story. Tell me about Wall Street, and then tell me when did you actually first get into computers?

Snipe:
I left high school. I was living with my sister in a tent in Montana for about nine months. Then it got too cold, our toothpaste started to freeze during the day. We were like, "F this business." We went down to Colorado because we'd met some friends at Colorado School of Mines. Stayed there for a little bit. Came back to New Jersey, and was like, "Well, I don't want to go to college. I also don't have any money for college." [laughs]

There's that. I ended up waitressing for a little bit. Was waitressing, wearing my indoor soccer shoes, because I was a soccer player for 13 years. The coach from Caine College came in to eat at my restaurant. He looks at me with disdain and he goes, "You actually play soccer with those, or are they just for fashion?"

Matt:
Oh, my goodness.

Snipe:
I'm like, "Bitch, I was All-State. What are you talking about?"
[laughter]

Snipe:
He's like, "Do you want to go to college?" I'm like, "I guess." He invited me to go to Caine College where I studied education of the hearing impaired for exactly one semester.
[laughter]

Snipe:
I was like, "Holy crap. This is so boring. I can't do this." Not the education of the hearing impaired part.

Matt:
Just college.

Snipe:
Yes, it just wasn't my jam. I was like, "I want to move to New York." I moved to New York City. I pick up a paper, and I'm like, "Okay, I'm super not qualified to do any of these things." Basically, I was a leatherworker at a Renaissance Fair. I'd done makeup work for the adult film industry. I'm like, "Um." Of course, the easiest way to Wall Street is sales. I had the most grueling interview I've ever had in my life, because I didn't know anything about real sales compared to retail.

I remember sweating so hard. I'd just dyed my hair back to a normal color. You could still see a little bit of green in it, and I'm wearing my sister's fancy, fancy suit. I have no idea what I'm actually going to be doing there. It is literally out of Glengarry Glen Ross, high-pressure sales that they're expecting from me. I'm like, "I'm 17, 18 years old. I have no idea what I'm doing." I managed to pull it out. At the very last minute, I got the job.

Matt:
Nice.

Snipe:
Was working at a place that did forex futures. Then they went out of business because the principals moved back to Argentina with all of our clients' money. That spent a little bit of time in the attorney general's office, making it really clear that we had nothing to do with it.

Matt:
At least it was there and not jail.

Snipe:
That's absolutely true. It's not that uncommon that the main traders are the ones that actually have the access to the real money. Then we started working at a stock shop. I realized I was working until six, seven o'clock at night, busting my ass all for lines in a ledger. I was actually pretty good at that job, but I also caught myself using those creepy, sleazy sales techniques on my friends and my family. When you catch yourself saying, "Well, let me ask you this." You're like, "Ah, ah."

Matt:
"I hate myself. Oh, my God, what am I doing?"

Snipe:
I know. I just realized that I hated myself, and that I didn't want to do it anymore. I quit my job. I had a boyfriend at that time that had a computer. That's pretty much it. I had done some basic programming, literally BASIC programming in high school.

Matt:
Like QBasic?

Snipe:
Yes. BASIC in high school. In fact, funny story, when I wrote my first book-- I almost didn't graduate high school because my parents were getting divorced, and I just checked out. I was good in all my classes, I just checked out. I had to pass a computer programming class in order to graduate. My teacher, who was the track coach as well, Coach Terrell, he knew me from soccer. He calls me into his office.

He's like, "Alison, I've got to tell you. You just weren't here, and you know that if you don't show up, I penalize you for that. Did really well on all your tests, but attendance is not optional in this class. I just don't think I can pass you." I'm like, "I'm not going to graduate then." He's like, "All right. Well, the thing is that when you're here, you do really good work. I'm going to let you go this time, but you've really got to get your shit together."

Matt:
Wow.

Snipe:
When I published my first programming book, I sent him a copy.
[laughter]

Matt:
That's awesome.

Snipe:
I wrote on the inside, "Dear Coach Terrell, thanks for having faith in me." [laughs]

Matt:
That's amazing, and you know he has that sitting on the shelf where everyone can see it.

Snipe:
Yes, yes, yes.

Matt:
That's really cool.

Snipe:
That was really nice of him. [laughs] My life would have had a slightly different outcome if I'd had to take some more time, and get a GED, and everything else just because I didn't show up to my programming class.

Matt:
Wow.

Snipe:
Anyway, I left Wall Street because I had a soul, apparently.

Matt:
Turns out.

Snipe:
It turns out, "Surprise." I totally still have one.
[laughter]

Matt:
It's funny because you're telling me this whole story, and what I'm seeing in front of my face in Skype is your avatar. For anyone who's never seen this avatar, it's got a star around one eye, smirky, slanty eyes, looking down where you're like, "I'm going to get you." It's funny hearing you tell this story, and just the dissonance is so strong of seeing that, hearing your voice, and then hearing you talk about being on Wall Street. Obviously, I'm looking back. Hindsight is 20/20, but seeing this story turned out the way it has so far does not surprise me, looking at the picture of you that I'm looking at right now.

Snipe:
Mohawk people have souls too.

Matt:
It turns out, yes.

Snipe:
I got that mohawk as a fundraiser for EFF.

Matt:
Really?

Snipe:
I raised like $1,500 for EFF a bunch of years ago.

Matt:
You just liked it and kept it?

Snipe:
Yes. Once I had it, I was like, "Wait a minute. This completely fits me. Why did I not have this my entire life?"

Matt:
That's awesome.

Snipe:
Yes, there was a good reason behind it.

Matt:
Honestly, what I meant is actually the inverse which is that I associate having the soul-- When you imagine a soulless, crushing New York City job where you hate what you're doing, you don't usually associate it with the sense of owning who I am and myself that is associated with the picture I'm looking at right in front of me. Your boyfriend at that time had a computer, you actually had a little bit of history because you'd studied at least some coding. You said primarily and BASIC in high school. Where did you go from there? Was that when you were doing the Renaissance Fairs, and you started building that? Or was there a step before that?

Snipe:
No. Remember, this is back when the Web-- I'm 42.

Matt:
I wasn't making any assumptions about what the Web was like at that point.

Snipe:
I think there might have been one HTML book that was about to come out. That's where we were. If you wanted to do anything on the Web, you basically figured out how to right-click-

Matt:
View source them.

Snipe:
-and view source, and you just poked at things until they did what you wanted. There was no other way around that. I realized that I really liked it because it let me say what I wanted to say, it let me make things look-- For what we had back then, we didn't have JavaScript, or CSS, or any of that stuff.

Matt:
Right. Use that cover tag.

Snipe:
Yes, exactly. It was enormously powerful to be able to have things to say, and put them out there, and other people could see it. Then I just started to freelance doing that. I was also doing some graphic design for one of those-- It's like the real estate magazines, like Autotrader type of things but for cars. I used to do photo correction for them using CorelDraw, I think it was.

Matt:
Oh, my gosh, that's a throwback.

Snipe:
Yes. I'm an old, old woman.
[laughter]

Matt:
I've used CorelDraw in my day, but it's been a long time.

Snipe:
Our hard drives would fill up every single day, and so we'd have to figure out what had already gone to press that we can delete it off. Basically, Photoshopping, to use Photoshop as a verb inappropriately, garbage cans and other stuff out of people's black and white, crappy photos. Because he was nice enough to give me a job. I offered and I said, "You know, I can make you a website." He's like, "Yes, the Internet's a fad." I was like, "I'm just trying to build up my portfolio, dude, for you for free." He's like, "Yes, yes, yes, it's not going to stick." I'm like, "Okay." [laughs]

Matt:
All right, buddy.

Snipe:
That's where it started. Then I think I moved to Virginia for a short amount of time, and then Georgia. Got a job at a computer telephony company where I was running their website, and also designing trade show materials like booths and stuff, which, by the way, I had no idea how to do. No one was more surprised than I was when they took pictures of the trade show and the booth actually looked amazing.

Matt:
That should look good.

Snipe:
I was like, "Look, yes."

Matt:
"Hey, look at that."
[laughter]

Snipe:
That's very, very lucky. There was definitely a lot of fake it until you make it. Also, I've never designed a trade show booth, but trade show booths do get designed by someone, and at least a handful of those people have never done it before.

Matt:
Right. I'm relatively intelligent person, I understand the general shape of things.

Snipe:
Yes. Get me some dimensions, I'm sure I could make this work.

Matt:
What is the DPI thing again? [chuckles]

Snipe:
Yes, exactly. That was exciting and fun. Then I moved back to New York to teach web design and graphic design at an extension of Long Island University.

Matt:
Cool.

Snipe:
Yes, it was actually very, very cool. The school was owned by these two teeny-tiny Israeli ladies. They were absolutely fabulous. It was kind of a crash course in Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish culture. It was in Flatbush, so basically, 90% of my students were Hasidic or Orthodox. I think I broke every rule ever. The two owners of the school would just look at me and laugh. They wouldn't offer me any guidance. They just liked watching.

Matt:
Well, it would be awkward. Yes.

Snipe:
Exactly. I'm like, "Why would you do that to me?"
[laughter]

Snipe:
They're just laughing. I could hear them laughing from upstairs-

Matt:
That's hilarious.

Snipe:
-when they knew I was putting my foot in another cultural mess. That was really, really fun. I learned a lot from that. I learned a lot about teaching. I even got to have a deaf student one time, which was great, except I didn't know-- I used to know or still know American sign language, but when I learned, there weren't any computer-related signs.
It was actually a weird barrier that I hadn't thought about.
We're like, "Okay, I can sign as I'm talking," but then I'm like, "Wait, do I have to spell all this stuff out every single time? I have no idea." That was cool. Then I started just doing HTML for a company called Cybergirl, which is not a porn site. I always have to clarify that. Not that there's anything wrong with porn, but it was not, in fact, a porn site. It was an online women's community.

Matt:
Cool.

Snipe:
They weren't really super profitable in the community itself, so they had a separate part that did websites for clients. I was put on to work mostly with their clients. They had stuff written in ASP, ColdFusion. Because the people who had designed it weren't there anymore, I basically had to learn all of these languages. Also, we only had a part time sysadmin, so when we'd hire someone new, I'm like, "I guess I'm creating email accounts for people now." I became a stand-in for a lot of different roles. Got to play with a lot of different languages, some of which I liked vastly better than others. ColdFusion? Really? [laughs]

Matt:
ASP wasn't that bad. There was worse things than classic ASP.

Snipe:
Yes, there are. That is a thing that could be said. That is an opinion one might have.
[laughter]

Matt:
Trying to keep a positive spin on it.

Snipe:
I would say that all of these languages, the ones that are still around, have come a very long way since then, including PHP.

Matt:
Yes, yes. .NET is not a classic ASP. PHP 5, whatever. PHP 7 is no PHP 3, for sure.

Snipe:
Certainly.

Matt:
Were you using PHP at that point already, then? Was that one your--

Snipe:
Yes. That was one I was-- Because I'd already done some Perl stuff, and it just wasn't that hard. One of our clients had a website, I think it was The Bone Marrow Foundation, had their website in PHP. That forced me to do a bit more legwork on it. That was the beginnings, the very beginnings.

Matt:
At that point, we're probably talking about single-page PHP files for each page. At the top, you've got a common.inc that you're doing your database connections. Then below that, it's just a template, right? Okay.

Snipe:
Functions.inc and usually some sort of PHTML. [laughs]

Matt:
God, PHTML, yes. Okay, all right.

Snipe:
I told you, I am an old, old lady.

Matt:
Honestly, we worked on a site that still used PHTML and things like four or five years ago. I was like, "I didn't even know that PHP parser is still allowed for this." Apparently, some of these things still stick around.

Snipe:
Whatever you set as your acceptable file formats, it'll parse.

Matt:
Yes, you can make it happen.

Snipe:
I can have a .dot site file extension if I wanted to.

Matt:
I like that idea now. Jeez. When was the transition? What were the steps between there and ending up where you are now? Are we still many steps behind, or did you get out on your own pretty quickly after that?

Snipe:
I was doing some contract work. Thanks to a friend that I'd met through IRC. I was doing some contract work for a company out in San Diego. They were an ad agency. This is the beginning of the days when marketing companies were trying to own digital, and they were trying to build up their digital departments. They moved me out there because they're like, "You're amazing, so come on out here and build up our team." I did. I built up their team. We had some really cool clients. We had San Diego Zoo, San Diego Padres, California Avocado Commission. At that time, I didn't like avocados. I was giving away free avocados that I did not like.

Matt:
[chuckles] Oh, no. That's so good.

Snipe:
I hate myself now for knowing how many avocados I could have had. [laughs] I got to build lots of custom web apps, all the database-y stuff. That was really fun. I left there, started my own web design company for lack of a better term, where I was basically using PHP, but also pretending like I knew how to design anything at all. Sorry, hang on. Incoming call. Building my own custom applications for people. None of it is really that fancy, but whatever. That was fun. Then I broke my foot. This is before the ACA, and so I had no insurance. Thousands of dollars and a spiral fracture later, I'm like, "Maybe I should get a real job."
[laughter]

Snipe:
I started to work for the San Diego Blood Bank, which was a great gig. It's probably my favorite job. The pay wasn't that great, but my coworkers were great. Your hours were your hours. There was no overtime. If you had to work overtime, you got paid double time and a half, something like that. It was insane.

Matt:
Especially compared to the ad agency world, which is basically the exact opposite.

Snipe:
Yes. Yes. There's no amount of blood you can show to prove that you're loyal to that particular market. I ended up moving back to New York and ended up working for the Village Voice for a little while.

Matt:
Really? That's cool.

Snipe:
Yes, that was cool. Unfortunately, they had already been bought out by Newtimes, and so they were not the Village Voice that I grew up with, the one that warmed the liberal cockles of my heart. It was actually a crap place to work, to be honest. People were getting fired all the time. There was this one guy, he used to hang out in the archives room with an X-Acto blade and a piece of paper and would just cut at the piece of paper. He was actually scary. Everyone was afraid of him, because that's office shooter kind of crazy.

Matt:
Exactly, exactly.

Snipe:
I left there, finally, and worked for another ad agency. That's the one that I was working at when I finally started to work with Snipe-IT. Finally started to make Snipe-IT. For a while, while I was in California, the nice thing about running your own gig back then, because it was like a one-man shop, so I didn't have people that I had to worry about. I got a chance to work with tigers for about a year. It was just exhausting.
That was around the time when I was writing my book, too. Working with tigers, commuting four hours a day, coming home stinking like raw chicken and tiger pee. Then working on my book, and then whatever I can possibly eke out for customers. It was pretty chaotic and definitely exhausting, but they were good times.

Matt:
I don't want to preach too far on this, but I feel like the more of our story that takes us around different aspects of life and different experiences, the more we bring to the thing we're in right now. That's one of the reasons I keep pushing on people having histories before they came to tech or diverse histories in tech. It's not to say that someone who just graduated from college and instantly got a job as a developer is therefore now incomplete, but I think that a lot of what makes a lot of people interesting is what they bring outside.

That's true for anybody, right? What makes you different from the people around you makes you different, and makes you interesting, and it makes you have a perspective to be able to bring that the people around you don't. It sounds like you have quite a few of those, at least as you enter into the communities that I'm asking you from the perspective of whether PHP, or Laravel, or anything like that. I don't know where I'm going with that, but anyway.

Snipe:
[laughs]

Matt:
That's very interesting to hear.

Snipe:
I always say I sound really interesting on paper. I'm not really that interesting to talk to, but when you actually look at all the crap I've done, it's like, "Wow. That's kind of a lot."

Matt:
Right. That is a lot going on.

Snipe:
It's all weird. Weird stuff.

Matt:
If I remember right, the book that you wrote was a Wrox PHP book, right?

Snipe:
Yes, yes. You can still get it on Amazon, but it costs more to ship.

Matt:
Really? I got to--

Snipe:
Actually, I'm not sure. It may just be eBay. The last time I checked, it was selling for $2.95 and costs like $80 to ship. [laughs]

Matt:
All right. Yes. $22.99. Wow. What was your experience like writing a book? Would you do it again?

Snipe:
Possibly, but I would need a bit more written assurances up front about how-- This is a co-authored book. Basically, we were not given communication information with each other. We were writing these chapters completely independently and it sucked. I offered to set up a bulletin board just so we could-- For some reason, they didn't want us talking to each other or something. I don't know, but I was like, "Because I don't know where this chapter is going to fall, I want to make sure that I'm not rehashing a thing that's already been discussed, or touching on something that needs more information."

They never facilitated that. They actually pushed back against it. It was really frustrating. You're literally writing chapters in a vacuum that then have to be cohesive when you string them all together. I would need to know if it was going to be a co-authorship. I would need to know that this will truly be collaborative. Because the way it looks on the cover, it looks like we're all hanging out. No, I don't think I've ever spoken to those people ever. [laughs]

Matt:
Wow. Jeez.

Snipe:
It's really weird. It's really weird. I did not like that. I thought that was really just not a way to give the best experience to the reader. If I was going to collaborate, I would have to make sure that there was something like that. I've toyed with writing a couple of books over the last few years. It is also a bit of a time suck.

Matt:
Yes, it is. My perception, what I've told people in the past is that people often ask me, "Should I write a book with a traditional publisher like you did?" Because mine was with O'Reilly. "Or should I self-publish like a lot of the people in our community have?" My general perception has been, if you want to make money, self-publish.

Snipe:
Definitely.

Matt:
If you want reach that's outside of your current ability, then consider a traditional publisher. You've got quite a bit of reach and I wonder whether it's--

Snipe:
This is like 2003, though.

Matt:
I don't mean for them, but I mean now. If you're going at it now. It seems like there'll probably be less of a reason for you to do a traditional publisher at this point.

Snipe:
I don't know, though. I still kind of O'Reilly.

Matt:
You still like it?

Snipe:
Being a published O'Reilly author, I still toy with that, honestly.

Matt:
I tell people I got a degree in secondary English education, basically. This O'Reilly book is my proof that I'm actually a real programmer.

Snipe:
[laughs] You know what? Honestly, that was really important to me back then.

Snipe:
Me too, really.

Matt:
I don't know where things would have gone, I don't know if I would have-- I probably would have stuck with it because I really, really liked it. I think that gave me a bit of confidence that I really needed. Proof, again, because I didn't graduate college. I nearly didn't graduate high school because of the programming class. [laughs] It was a way for me to say not just to the rest of the world, but to myself, like, "Hey, I actually know what I'm talking about."

Matt:
You can't underappreciate just how significant that is. I love that you said it. It's not just to everybody else, it's to you, too.

Snipe:
More than anyone else, to myself, honestly. I don't care what you guys think. [laughs]

Matt:
I spent several thousand hours writing a book with a major publisher so that I can overcome impostor syndrome. It's totally worth it.
[laughter]

Snipe:
I still have it. That's a thing, I have it.

Matt:
I still have it, but maybe a little less.

Snipe:
At least if someone actually pushes the impostor syndrome too far, I'll be like, "I wrote a book. What have you done?"

Matt:
Exactly.

Snipe:
Meanwhile, I go off and rock in the corner as if, "Oh, my God. I don't deserve to be here. I don't deserve to be here."

Matt:
Exactly. It certainly doesn't make it go away, but maybe it's a tool in our arsenal to battle it.

Snipe:
That's a very good way to describe it.

Matt:
I like it.

Snipe:
I would need that to be a bit more of a tighter process.

Matt:
Well, if you decide to write with O'Reilly, I know some people. Just give me a call.

Snipe:
[laughs] I also know some people in O'Reilly.

Matt:
I was just going to say I'm pretty sure you don't need me for any of that kind of stuff. I just had to say it to try and seem like I actually matter, so this works.

Snipe:
Of course, you matter.

Matt:
I matter.

Snipe:
I got up early for you, Matt. I got up early for you.

Matt:
That's true.

Snipe:
You don't have any idea.

Matt:
That's true, this is quite early your time. I appreciate it.

Snipe:
[laughs]

Matt:
I'm trying to not talk forever. I'm trying to move us on even though I'm just my usual caveats, everyone take a drink. You eventually started Snipe-IT. I think we skipped a couple of things. We were talking about you becoming the CTO of the ad agency and being in a place where you needed to manage that kind of stuff. You started Snipe-IT.
You now have a remote team. Could you tell me a little about the makeup of your team, and what it's like running a remote team, and the pros and cons you've experienced, and anything else that you would want to share about what that experience is like for you?

Snipe:
Well, I'm really lucky, first of all, because although our team is remote, we're all also local. We can actually see each other, we'll go out and have beers when we hit a major milestone. We'll go out and have some champagne and celebrate that we do get to see each other's faces. Also, we were friends first, so that helps. It's totally, totally different. If you're looking for advice on how to run a real remote team, that I can't help you with. I can't tell you how to manage your friends through Slack, though. [laughs]

Matt:
Basically, you and a bunch of friends live like an hour driving distance to each other or whatever and choose to work from home?

Snipe:
More like seven minutes. [laughs]

Matt:
Jeez.

Snipe:
Yes, yes.

Matt:
Okay, so this is really just like, "We just don't feel like going to an office," kind of vibe.

Snipe:
It's pants, it's pants. I'm not putting on pants. I've worked too hard in my career to have to put on pants anymore. There is a reason this isn't a video call, Matt. Seriously.
[laughter]

Matt:
I wish that this was one of the podcasts--

Snipe:
I think I just made Matt blush, by the way.

Matt:
I wish this was one of the podcasts where they name each episode, because that would have been the name right there for this episode. I might have to, just for this one, just give it a name just for that. Okay. I hear you. I get it.

Snipe:
The thing is I hadn't actually planned on hiring when I did. The reality is I should have, because I was really buckling under the helpdesk. That customer support load was a lot. It was causing me a great deal of anxiety. Looking back at it now, it was really untenable. Of course, I think that I'm 10 feet tall and bulletproof, so I'm like, "I got this. I got this." Meanwhile, it's four o'clock in the morning and I can't even see straight anymore. I ended up having to hire someone for a personal reason. She's actually worked out great. She's an absolute rock star on the helpdesk. She's never worked a helpdesk before, and she owns it. It's actually really, really great.
Once I'd hired her, I think-- The onboarding takes a little bit. Especially, literally never worked a helpdesk before, so it's not just onboarding with my company, it's like onboarding the entire concept. As soon as she got her footing, she just completely handled it. It was really great. The next hire was a developer/sysadmin that I've known for a while. He is just fantastic. He's actually the harder one because he, I think, requires a little bit more structure, and a little bit more face time. I need to be better. I do. I need to be better about working with that because in my head, I'm still managing this the way that I want to be managed. I forget that that's actually not my job anymore.

Matt:
People are different.

Snipe:
Yes, people are different. Also, not everybody wants what I want. Frankly, it doesn't matter what I want. Ultimately, that's no longer a luxury that I have, caring more about how I want things to go for myself. That priority has shifted, and so I'm having to painfully learn [chuckles] that lesson. Not painfully. I love my entire team. They're absolutely amazing. I'm super, super grateful for them every day that goes by.
Every time one of them takes vacation, we all hold on to our desks. We're like, "Okay, we can get through this, we can get through this." It's a learning curve, certainly. I've run my own small business, I've run dev teams. This is a different thing though, because the reason why I wanted to make this a company instead of just running this as a side project is because I've worked for tons of shitty companies. I want to build the company that I wish I'd worked for.

Matt:
I'm so sorry for doing this, but I was doing that thing where you're hearing somebody talking and waiting for your chance to talk. I literally was about to say Dan and I, when we started Tighten, the first thing we said was, "We want to build the company we want to work for." You just said and I'm like, "Exactly." That introduces the problem you're talking about, which is you just assume everybody wants the same things you want. It also means nobody else gets to force you to put people through things that you wouldn't want to be put through. It's an incredible freedom if you can make it profitable.

Snipe:
Yes. Absolutely. Getting to institute stuff that I think is really worker-friendly. We all make our own hours. We have office hours so that when Victoria's handling the helpdesk, she's got access to the text that she needs during a certain amount of time. In general, she's got a kid. We have to have that flexibility, so that she-- Honestly, she just lets us know that she's going to pick up her kid. It's like, "Okay, cool. See you back in half an hour or whatever." Vacation, she had not had a real vacation in probably 10 or 15 years. Last year, we were like, "You are taking vacation." She kept checking into Slack. I'm like, "Girl, I will actually revoke your credentials."

Snipe:
-so that they can actually go and do something awesome, and relaxing, and not stress about money while they're there, and just get to go and actually enjoy things, and come back refreshed and ready to work. It's pretty cool being able to come up with stuff like this and really like, "What would I have needed?" Because when I was working at the ad agencies especially, I would accrue my PTO.
Honestly, that's why Snipe-IT existed. It was because I had two and a half weeks, three weeks of PTO that was not going to roll over. They made me take vacation in November. They wouldn't let me do it in December. They made me do it in November, and I was like, "Yes, three weeks of just relaxing, playing video games." That didn't work. I accidentally the product. [laughs] Now, I accidentally the business.

Matt:
That's awesome. One of the things I often talk about as an entrepreneur, as a business owner is something that I think people are scared of talking about, which is power. Because being a business owner means you get to hire, you get to figure out how money is spent, you get to figure out what pressures are and are not put in the people you work with. I call that power, but I think power doesn't have to be a scary word because, really, what matters is what you do with the power.

When we hear power as a negative thing, it is usually because the people on power are benefiting themselves. I think that something is really beautiful, and wonderful, and we need more of in the world is when we can see power as a positive thing, because people get power and then use it for the benefit of other people. I just want to applaud and affirm what you're doing, because you just described that. It's like, "I got power, and the first thing I did was work to make other people's lives better understanding what the situation that they were in was." I love hearing that. I'm really glad that we got to talk about this today.

Snipe:
Well, thank you. I'm looking forward to coming up with more stuff like that.

Matt:
I love it.

Snipe:
It's super important to me. Our customers are incredibly important to us, obviously, but my staff is as important. You can't have one without the other either direction.

Matt:
In the end, they're just both people who you work with. The hope is that you're able to make both groups of people really have lives that are better because they had a chance to interact with you.

Snipe:
Yes, absolutely.

Matt:
Okay. We are almost out of time. I asked people at Tighten if they had any questions for you. They gave me a million, and I haven't gotten any of them. They're all going to be mad at me, so I'm trying to look at the one that I could pull up that won't turn into a 30-minute long conversation.

Snipe:
I'm Italian. There is literally nothing you can talk to me about that won't turn into a 30-minute conversation. [laughs]

Matt:
All right. I'll literally go with the question that has the least words in it and see if that gets us anywhere. Coffee or tea?

Snipe:
Red Bull.

Matt:
There you go. See how short that was? All right.

Snipe:
This podcast is sponsored by Red Bull.
[laughter]

Matt:
It's so funny that it's been the thing at Tighten for the longest time, where those of us who started the company and the first hires were primarily coffee people. There's one tea holdout, but over time, the tea contingent has grown. Just within the last nine months, we hired two people who are Red Bull addicts. All of a sudden, we're shopping for the company on-site and they're like, "Orange Red Bull, no sugar, energy, blah, blah, blah." I'm like, I have a course in Red Bull flavors. Anyway, I still think it's pretty gross, but I did try some of them.

Matt:
I don't get it. Please pitch me on why I would drink red Bull instead of coffee then.

Snipe:
No. If you don't drink Red Bull, then there will be more for me. First of all, I'm not going to pitch that.

Matt:
World's dwindling storage of Red Bull.

Snipe:
Obviously, we buy our stores out of local Red Bull, it's ridiculous. We have a main store, and then we have a failover store. Listen, you don't drink it because it tastes good. It tastes like dog ass, but it wakes you up. It keeps you awake. It feels the same role that coffee does, and frankly, I don't think that coffee tastes that good.

Matt:
Okay. Fair enough.

Snipe:
I can ask the same question to you.

Matt:
Right. For you, it's a combination. You don't like the flavor of either, but one of them you can buy in bulk and throw in the fridge?

Snipe:
Yes, yes.

Matt:
Got it. I get that. I love the flavor of coffee, but I'm like a geek. I have all the equipment, and all that kind of stuff.

Matt:
Not to make a statement on this particular-- I have one more and I'm praying that I can make it short, but I probably won't. You are a member of the Laravel community. You use Laravel. You share things every once in a while, but for someone who is such a big name, who's a member of the Laravel community, much of your popularity is not within the Laravel community. You're not popular because you're speaking at Laracon, you're not creating Laravel packages that all the people are consuming.

It's this interesting thing where you're a very well-known person who uses Laravel and is a member of the Laravel community but is not necessarily gaining all that fame within Laravel space. It's an interesting overlap. As someone who does have exposure to lots of the tech communities, you're in the InfoSec world, you've been in PHP for a while, but you're also solidly Laravel.
Do you have any perspectives on either, maybe the differences between InfoSec and PHP, differences between InfoSec and Laravel, and/or is there anything that you would say to the Laravel community, or things you'd either applaud or hope to see grow? Is there anything you just want to say about the way Laravel compares, or connects, or overlaps, or whatever with the rest of the world that you're in?

Snipe It's always an ongoing joke in the InfoSec community. PHP developers are pretty much the easiest punching bag in the InfoSec community.

Matt:
And everywhere else.

Snipe:
In fact, I think just yesterday, I submitted an eye-rolling gift in relation to someone at InfoSec, bagging on PHP developers. I get it. When the language first came out, it was really easy to learn. You didn't need to have any knowledge of programming, or discipline, or best practices. There were no best practices for quite some time in PHP. I totally get that. The thing is that that's not really the world that we live in anymore. It's actually hard to write a PHP application without using a framework these days. Because the frameworks are so much better and it's so much faster, that for me, I'm pretty sure I could still write a PHP application without a framework, but why the hell would?

If I ever have to write another gddmn login auth routine, I'll kill myself. I will actually kill myself. Comparing InfoSec to PHP or Laravel is like comparing apples to orangutans. They're entirely different animals and there is a little bit of overlap, but typically not. In general, PHP has a bad reputation in InfoSec. In fact, I will tell you a very brief story about how I got into InfoSec. This one's always a fun one. I used to run a nonprofit organization when I moved to California the first time.

It was basically like Megan's Law for animal abusers. Criminal animal abuse. I would pull in data, break it down statistically based on a couple of different pointers like domestic violence connection, blah blah blah blah blah, and basically run statistics on that stuff. This was going back a very, very long time when nobody really knew or gave a crap at all about AppSec.

At one point, my website got hacked. The organization's website got hacked. I am literally on my way to speak at a conference in Florida, an animal welfare conference. I'm checking in. I'm like, "Hi, I'm Alison Gionatto. I'm a speaker." She goes, "You're petabuse.com. That's great. I'm so sorry to hear about what happened." I'm like, "I've been on a plane for a couple of hours." I'm like, "Wait, what?" [chuckles] I run to my hotel room, and somebody has defaced the website with an animated GIF, and a song playing in the background which was basically a clip from Meetspin, and they linked to Meatspin. If any of your listeners don't know what Meatspin is-

Matt:
I don't.

Snipe:
-please do not Google that. You can google it, but have safe search on.

Matt:
Is it like Goatse kind of stuff?

Snipe:
Yes. "You spin me right round, baby, right round" playing in the background on autoloop. To this day, when I hear that song, I shiver a little bit.

Matt:
Trigger, yes.

Snipe:
Exactly. I ended up actually talking to this guy who thought that we were a much bigger organization than we were. He was trying to extort money, of course. I was like, "Dude, you have you have no idea. We get like $800 in donations every month. You are barking up the wrong tree." He's like, "I thought you were bigger. I'm sorry, but it is what it is." I toyed with him long enough to figure out what he had done. The thing is, this is on a Cobalt RaQ server. First of all, we're going back. Second of all, those are not exactly going for their security, but it was what I could afford. Honestly, it's what I could afford. I figured it out, I locked him out. I did leave him one final kind of F you text.
[laughter]

Snipe:
Just so that he knew. That was how I got into this in the first place was basically a horrific, horrific internet meme and the defacement of my organization's website. Again, this is 2004, 2005. Application security became really important to me, and that’s why I’m here. [chuckles] That’s why I go to DEF CON. That’s why I speak about application security and security in general. To get back to your original question, there isn’t really an overlap.
There is this disdainful relationship, for the most part, coming from both directions because InfoSec people don’t typically treat programmers in general very well, but especially not PHP developers. PHP developers are tired of getting shit on, and so they don’t necessarily treat-- It becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling--

Matt:
Impostor, yes. Exactly.

Snipe:
Honestly, it’s all just a bunch of dumbass egos and it's stupid. If we would just talk to each other a little bit more, we'd probably be a little better off.

Matt:
Come on, somebody. You’ll be surprised to hear that I could talk about InfoSec and PHP for an hour, but we’re out of time. I don’t know if I’m going to have you back sometime or I don’t know what, but this’s been amazing. I really appreciate you spending some time with me. Before we cut off for the day and I cry because of all the topics I’m not going to cover, is there anything you wanted to talk about? Anything you want to plug, anything you want to cover, anything you want to say to the people that we haven’t got to cover today?

Snipe:
Nothing that really comes to mind. I am still really passionate about AppSec. If you’re using a framework and you’re not utilizing all of the security stuff that’s built in already, specifically Laravel is really good with that. I've had write some Middleware to add some additional CSP headers and things like that. If you’re already paying the price, the overhead of using a framework, then freaking use it.

Actually use all of the bits that are good, not just the bits that you don’t feel like writing. Laravel makes it really hard to avoid the CSRF tokens. You’ll actually have to go out of your way to disable those. I like that about Laravel. I like that it's opinionated. I like that it doesn’t want you to screw this up. That said, any developer left to their own devices sufficiently motivated will still screw it up.

Matt:
Will screw something up, yes.

Snipe:
Yes, Exactly. Frameworks like Laravel, I think once that are headed in the right direction, so your default login already uses bcrypt to hash the password. You would, again, have to go out of your way to write something that would store something in cleartext or MD5. I think it’s a step in the right direction. Use your frameworks, learn what their built-in security functionality is, and use them.

Matt:
Use it. [laughs]

Snipe:
One of the packages I’m actually writing for Laravel right now is an XSS package which will basically walk through your schema, and will try and inject rows of XSS stuff in there so that when you reload the app and if you got to any kind of functional testing or acceptance testing setup, you’ll be able to see very quickly what you've forgotten to escape.

Matt:
I love it.

Snipe:
For a normal Laravel app, that's actually hard to do because the double braces will escape everything. For example, if you're using data from an API, maybe you’re not cleaning it as well or whatever. That’s one of the packages that I actually am working on.

Matt:
That’s great. Also, if you're using JavaScript, it's really common for people to not escape it, and so that all of a sudden, they forget to clean it.

Snipe:
Exactly. I wanted one quick way to basically just check and see how boned I was. That'll be fun.

Matt:
Yes. Does it have a name yet that we can watch for or would you just link it once you have it?

Snipe:
Well, the only name-- You know how the mocking data packages called Faker? You can imagine what I’m considering calling this that I probably won’t call it? [laughs]

Matt:
Probably won’t, but now we can all remember it that way? Yes.

Snipe:
No promises. Absolutely no promises is all I'm saying. [laughs]

Matt:
Assuming it’s safe for work, I will link the name in the show notes later. If not, you could just go-- [crosstalk]
[laughter]

Snipe:
Again, no promises.

Matt:
I like it. Okay. You all have taken enough drinks, so I won’t say my usual ending for you to drink too. Snipe, Alison, thank you so much. Thank you for the ways you have spoken up for a lot of things that really matter both in this call and our community as a whole. Thank you for hopefully helping me but also our entire community get better going forward, but also the things you brought to us in the past in terms of application security. I don’t know why I didn’t say this earlier, but Mr. Rogers is maybe one of my top heroes of all time. That was what was going through my mind when you were talking about running your company.

Thank you for being that force both for running companies that way and taking care of people, and then, of course, by proxy for just the people who you're working with. The more people that are out there doing that, I think the better it is for all of us. This has been ridiculously fun. If anyone wants to follow you on Twitter, what’s your Twitter handle and what are other things they should check out? That URL for Snipe-IT? I will put all of these in the show notes, but I just wanted you to get a chance to say them all at the end.

Snipe:
My Twitter handle is @snipeyhead, because @snipe was taken. I'm still pissed at that guy.
[laughter]

Snipe:
The URL for Snipe-IT is snipeitapp.com. Not very creative. All of our issues are on GitHub. Your pool of requests are welcome.
[laughter]

Snipe:
As always.

Matt:
Nice.

Snipe:
It is free. If it helps you solve some of your problems at your organization, we would love for you to try it out. If you'd like to give us money, that's awesome too. Ultimately, the more people who are using it, the better.

Matt:
Nice. Okay. Well, thank you so much for your time. Everyone, check out the show notes as always. We'll see you again in a couple of weeks with a special episode. I'll tell you more what it is when that one happens. See you.

Matt Stauffer:
Welcome back to the latest episode of Laravel Podcast, season three, where I interview the people you know, or I interview the people you don't know, but either way, I'm interviewing people who you should know. This one is the most interesting one yet, which is kind of crazy to say, since we've had all sorts of interesting people, including the founder of Laravel, because what we have right here is what would you say -- I feel like there's some phrase that people use when they talk about behind every something there's a woman -- I don't know, whatever. This is the woman-

Abigail Otwell:
Behind every great man, there's a great woman?

Matt Stauffer:
There's a something woman.

Abigail Otwell:
Something.

Matt Stauffer:
Right?

Abigail Otwell:
Something like that. [laughs]

Matt Stauffer:
I feel like it's something that's funnier, or stronger, or more -- whatever, but this is true here as well. I would say, and I'm interested to hear how Abigail feels about this and how Taylor feels about this, but it is very likely that without the support of Abigail Otwell, who I have here today, there would be no Laravel because I know that we're going to learn more today about what that story looks like. Obviously, you wouldn't say that because you're humble and all those things, but I think that's very likely the case. The goal today is to learn about Miss Abigail Otwell. Can you say "Hi" to the people, and for those who don't know you tell -- I ask this to everybody, tell us a little bit about yourself and who you are and then, we'll get digging into the backstory.

Abigail Otwell:
Hey. Well, let me think. I am Abigail Otwell and I live in Arkansas, and I have not lived here my whole life. I was born in Connecticut and raised in Pennsylvania, and moved to Oklahoma. When I was 16, my family moved to Oklahoma. I met Taylor a month before I turned 18 and we dated for a few months, and we were engaged for 30 days before we got married- [laughs]

Matt Stauffer:
Yes. [laughs] That's awesome.

Abigail Otwell:
-and we started on this crazy journey together, but it's been really great. We've really just had a great time, just a great life. [laughs]

Matt Stauffer:
I like it. You just gave us the broad overview and we're going to spend the next 45 minutes digging in deep into that.

Abigail Otwell:
[laughs]

Matt Stauffer:
If you meet somebody at the store today, that's not the story you give them. You meet somebody at the store and they say, "Hey. Oh, you've got these young kids, but what do you do?" How do you answer that question for people?

Abigail Otwell:
That's kind of tough for me because I feel like some people, when I say -- I feel like I'd say, "I'm just a stay-at-home mom," or whatever, but it's a big job.

Matt Stauffer:
There's no "just" on that one.

Abigail Otwell:
No. I feel like now, the kids are in school, it's even harder for me to figure out what to say to that because it's like, "What do you all day?" [laughs] But somehow, the days just fly by, just stay busy and yes. I tell them I'm a stay-at-home mom and I do sew. I used to take orders -- I sometimes decide to take orders, then I get kind of burned out because it's a lot of work and just a lot of time away from other stuff that I'd rather be doing. I really love sewing for my daughter, but I don't know, I'm not really into mass manufacturing it. [laughs]

Matt Stauffer:
That was actually going to be my next question about sewing because I know that, at one point, that was kind of -- You would be sewing on the couch and he'd be coding the couch, you guys have mentioned that issue before. When you were sewing -- I don't know anything about custom sewing, were you using, in design and development terms, were you the designer and the developer, or were you using somebody else's designs and you were mainly just doing implementation?

Abigail Otwell:
Well, some of both. The first time I took orders, I was actually using a pattern I had made up myself by just sketching from a dress that I had and I took like 36 orders for that dress. That was part of being burned out, I think, because it was one design and there was 30-some of the same fabric, so yes, that was a lot. But that's really a lot of -- When he was coding and I was sewing was because I had so many orders to finish. But for the most part, I used patterns as a framework, so to speak.

Matt Stauffer:
I like that.

Abigail Otwell:
[laughs] And I just kind of throw the directions out in certain parts of the pattern and then I just go from there. I almost never stick completely to a pattern.

Matt Stauffer:
So there's a little bit of everything. You are using tools or frameworks to help you get started, but then there's a creative aspect, but there's also a production aspect. It's when you spend too much time in production, like you mentioned, 32 orders, that it just like, "Do I really want to keep doing this?"

Abigail Otwell:
Right, yes, it does get to be a lot.

Matt Stauffer:
Have you ever done any boys' clothes or it's been all dresses and bell bottoms and stuff?

Abigail Otwell:
Well, I did some-

Matt Stauffer:
-and blouses.

Abigail Otwell:
[laughs] I did some -- Well, I've done some -- a few things for James. I made him a Prince Charming costume when we went to Walt Disney World.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh, cool.

Abigail Otwell:
He didn't really want to wear it, but I kind of made him wear it.
[laughter]

Matt Stauffer:
Mom.

Abigail Otwell:
Then, he got kissed by Cinderella and it was all over. [laughs]

Matt Stauffer:
Nice.

Abigail Otwell:
He still hates that costume.

Matt Stauffer:
That's awesome.

Abigail Otwell:
I've done a few things for him, but not a whole lot of boy stuff. Boys are just kind of boring when it comes to clothes. There's just-

Matt Stauffer:
Right, especially now because it's all just basically Under Armour everything.

Abigail Otwell:
Yes, he's all about-

Matt Stauffer:
Just match your colors.

Abigail Otwell:
-all the Under Armour and Nike you can imagine, so yes.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes. Okay, so we'll go more there in a bit, but I want to get into the backstory a bit. I tell everybody this, but you are in control of where we go and don't go.

Abigail Otwell:
Okay.

Matt Stauffer:
I'm just going to ask some questions. You moved around a lot when you were a kid. First question I always ask people in that context is, military?

Abigail Otwell:
No, we just moved around a lot. I'm trying to think, I think the longest I ever lived in one place growing up was four years.

Matt Stauffer:
Wow.

Abigail Otwell:
It was just constant moving and changing and meeting people. I don't know, I like living in one place, I really love to travel, but I'm okay just -- I mean, it's okay. I like that my kids have friends and have a lot more of a just steady-

Matt Stauffer:
Stable, yes.

Abigail Otwell:
-stable life than I did. Yes, I don't miss the moving part, I hate moving. [laughs]

Matt Stauffer:
I was just going to ask, what sort of impact do you think moving around so much made on you long term? Do you feel like you have a sense of that?

Abigail Otwell:
Yes. I was just talking to Taylor about this the other day, actually. I feel like it's hard if you don't live in the same place you grew up in. I was homeschooled, so I didn't go to school. I didn't go to college, so I feel like there's a lot of friendships that you make, lasting friendships that you tend to make. Like old friends that you can't really force once you're an adult. I feel like I don't have that because we did move around so much. I'm 22 hours from where I grew up, so it's not like -- Even the people I did know there, it's hard to keep in contact and keep real close when you're so far away.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes. You would say, "Oh, I go back home and see the people I went to middle school with. I go back home and see the people I went to high school with." None of that being around you.

Abigail Otwell:
No, no.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes, making friends as a grown-up turns out to be-

Abigail Otwell:
It's extremely difficult.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes, it's a lot of work.

Abigail Otwell:
It's frustrating, too. I don't know, it's just like I don't want to come off as too desperate, but sometimes, I'm like, "Hey, you want to go out to dinner? Because I really need a friend." [laughs]

Matt Stauffer:
You need friends, yes.

Abigail Otwell:
Yes.

Matt Stauffer:
All right. You were just shy of 18 and you met the strapping young gentleman, [laughs] who has brought this conversation together. What were your first impressions of young Taylor?

Abigail Otwell:
That he was really quiet. It wasn't exactly love at first sight. Him and my dad were really more friends before we became friends. I listened to them talk a lot and they had a lot of deep conversations. It was interesting, sometimes I would join in. But once we got to know him more and his personality started to come out, because -- I think a lot of people just think of him as quiet, but he is hilarious. He's really, really funny. I think once his personality came out more, I was like, "I really like him." [laughs]

Matt Stauffer:
Cool.

Abigail Otwell:
Yes.

Matt Stauffer:
How techy are you? No, first of all, how techy were you then, and how techy are you now?

Abigail Otwell:
Well, my family was not techy at all. Not at all. I was kind of the tech person of our family, but that was really just emails and phones. We didn't even have smartphones. I remember when he came over and he had the -- I think it was the first iPhone. We were like, "What is that?"
[laughter]

Abigail Otwell:
Oh my gosh, yes.

Matt Stauffer:
One of the first questions I always ask everybody is, what was your first access to computers? I'm going to ask you too. When was the first time you had access to a computer?

Abigail Otwell:
Yes, we got our first computer when I was 12, and that's back when there was dial-up and somebody picked up the phone and ruined your internet connection. My mom was really big into selling stuff on eBay back then, so I would often do all the posting for her. We used PayPal too back then, which was also pretty rough.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, wow.

Abigail Otwell:
I remember I learned all the HTML for the eBay listings.

Matt Stauffer:
Wait, how old were you at this point?

Abigail Otwell:
12.

Matt Stauffer:
You were 12 years old and you were writing -- Okay, so this is an unexpected part of this interview, where at 12 years old, you were writing HTML. This is destiny then-

Abigail Otwell:
[laughs] It really didn't go much further than that, but I learned how to make different sized fonts, different color fonts, spacing. Because you had to do all that manually back then on eBay.

Matt Stauffer:
In eBay, yes.

Abigail Otwell:
Yes, I learned-

Matt Stauffer:
You were using the color property, it was before CSS probably.

Abigail Otwell:
Right, right.

Matt Stauffer:
All right. Okay. While your family didn't have a lot of computers and stuff around, you did have a computer, you were writing HTML, you were selling stuff with PayPal on eBay. For the average 12-year-old home-schooler back in the '90s or whatever, you were pretty technically savvy.

Abigail Otwell:
Right, right, yes.

Matt Stauffer:
I'm guessing that that being the case, that still wasn't necessarily something that you and Taylor connected on, right?

Abigail Otwell:
Not really, no, not really.

Matt Stauffer:
When you were 12, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Abigail Otwell:
I really wanted to be a midwife or a doula, and I still do [laughs] actually. When I was in my teens, I read all the books to become a licensed doula or whatever. Do you know what that is?

Matt Stauffer:
Yes.

Abigail Otwell:
Okay.

Matt Stauffer:
Why don't you explain because I do because that's our-

Abigail Otwell:
Right, [laughs] you're a dad.

Matt Stauffer:
-that's our role, but can you explain for everybody what a doula is?

Abigail Otwell:
A doula is somebody that's there to support a mom during labor. She's really the person that comes for mom. She helps with relaxation and pressure points, just to be there and be reassuring. Basically, she's just there for the mom. That could be at home, that could be at a birth center, could be at a hospital.

Matt Stauffer:
I've always thought of the doula as basically the number one advocate for the mom, especially when the mom doesn't have a partner or the partner is not necessarily knowing what to do. I think of doulas as they know the things a mom's going to need to care about, they know the problems that they're going to run into, and they are likely the interference between mom and potential difficulty, right?

Abigail Otwell:
Yes, I agree. I feel like a lot of times, the poor dad's lost as to what to do and there's some things that only a woman can help you with when you're in labor, that men don't really know how to do. Yes, that's what I've always wanted to be since I was seven. Yes, maybe one day, when the kids are grown or whatever. The schedule would be just hard because there's no scheduling when you go into labor, so I could be gone all night, all day, so I think it'll be better to pursue that when the kids are a little bit bigger.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes. One of my questions I was going to ask is, let's say the kids are 16 or 18 or whatever, what would be your next thing? That's what you're thinking. You've got to be able to, say, get a phone call and be somewhere else with 30 minutes notice and be there for as long as it takes, for 20 hours or whatever. Yes, that's tough.

Abigail Otwell:
Yes, it is tough. I had a doula with my first and, bless her heart, she was there for 20 hours I think. [laughs] That's a long time.

Matt Stauffer:
My sister-in-law's a birth photographer, so she has a similar schedule and she's got kids around your kids' age, but the difference is the photographer doesn't have to be there the whole 20 hours. Now, they do need to be there when the baby comes out, but there's a little bit more flexibility, but even so, the only way she can do it is with a large, large, large support system of people who can jump in. Multiple grandparents ready to take a kid at the drop of the hat, and my brother has a flexible schedule, so it's a lot. I definitely hear you there.

Abigail Otwell:
I've actually thought about doing a birth photographer instead because I also love photography and it's actually something I'm pursuing. I'm taking a class in a few weeks, just to learn more about how to use a camera and stuff, so I have thought about that because I just love birth and being there, but that would be a little bit less time and less hands-on, so I don't know.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. Well if you do do that, I'll introduce you to someone.

Abigail Otwell:
Okay, sounds good. [laughs]

Matt Stauffer:
Cool. All right, so you were 12, you were doing HTML, eBay, home-schooled, met him at age 17, you guys moved pretty quickly and so, you're in Oklahoma, you are a newly married couple. I assume that he was working at that first job out of college at that point or still in college, so what was life like? What were you interested in? You weren't becoming a doula, at least right then, so what did it feel like for you at that point?

Abigail Otwell:
Well, let me think. I met him as soon as he graduated college because that's when he moved to a town close to ours.

Matt Stauffer:
Got it, okay.

Abigail Otwell:
He lived in Fort Smith, Arkansas, which is right over the border. We were on the very edge of Oklahoma, so we were only about 30 minutes apart. I met him a couple of days after he graduated. I don't know any kind of career or anything else. [laughs]

Matt Stauffer:
Anything else other than keeping this child alive and fed and-

Abigail Otwell:
Yes, yes, so that -- Life has moved really fast basically since then. Then, we had our second 20 months after we had our first, so they're just real close. Yes, it's just been crazy. I feel like that stage of our life, which was this just exhausting -- just tunnel we were in, that you can't think of anything else except surviving from day to day. Then, once I started to come out of that, I feel like it was about when our youngest was three or four, I started to realize, "Oh, wow, life isn't about babies-

Matt Stauffer:
I'm a human being. [laughs]

Abigail Otwell:
-and toddlers anymore.

Matt Stauffer:
Right, right.

Abigail Otwell:
[laughs] Yes. What am I going to do with myself? I almost started having this panic moment, like, "Oh my gosh, should I go to school? What should I do?" He's like, "Calm down, take it one day at a time. You'll be busy, trust me." [laughs] Yes, so-

Matt Stauffer:
Just so if anybody else is -- Well, people are listening to this. The amount of work that a stay-at-home parent has to do is just unbelievable. It's something where the question of "What do you do all day?" Well, sometimes that can be a non-malicious question to ask, but sometimes it's not. Regardless of whether or not it's a malicious question, if you find yourself in the circumstance where you have kids and you've never been a stay-at-home parent, just take a week off of work and send your spouse off on a vacation to just see what it's like.

Because I 've done it, and it is like -- Thankfully, my wife is very good at communicating to me the cost that it is on her, so I didn't have to do it to at least get that it's an idea. Having done it, I'm like, "This is non-stop work, non-stop exhaustion, non-stop energy. This is not just like, "Oh, yeah, I sit around and twiddle my thumbs." Have you noticed that children actually need taking care of?

Abigail Otwell:
Constantly. [laughs]

Matt Stauffer:
Usually, when you're a stay at home parent, you're also responsible for taking care of the house, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Right, exactly. I'm basically a cleaning person, I am a chef, I am a childcare person. I am all of these things all together at once. I want to affirm that that's a crazy amount of work, and even thinking anything about being an actual just human being in the midst of that can be pretty nuts.

Abigail Otwell:
Yes. It's kind of overwhelming, really. When you're just in the throes of it, like you still are, it's just, especially for her, I feel bad for her. It's really hard to be with your kids all day, with no other human interaction really. Looking back, I'm like, "Wow, that is really difficult." In the midst of it, you're just so tired, you can't really think straight, but once you come out of it, it's like, "Wow, yeah, that's really difficult." Having little kids is very, very difficult.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes. One of the things that we noticed was that it's probably a lot more difficult now than it used to be, when you had family living all around you and everyone was really close. One of the things we did to make up for the fact that our family all lives many hours away, was move to a neighborhood with tiny little yards, where everybody is really tight and close together, so that you get some of that kind of communal aspect, and that's helped us a little bit.

Abigail Otwell:
Yes. I remember many mornings just thinking, "Oh, I would just give anything to have a mom or somebody come and sit with my kids for two hours, so I could sleep." [laughter] Just sleep, I don't care if she does nothing else, just keep the kids from killing each other, and let me get some sleep.

Matt Stauffer:
Right. If they're alive and not screaming when I wake up, I'm good. Right, okay. That was a pretty significant period of your life. That was probably six, seven years before you're really to the point where she was three years old, four years old, and you're out of it now. You've talked about, you did some sewing and it turns out you can burn out on that a little bit. You also were thinking about ten years down the road, 15 years down the road, or whatever it ended up being, where you're in a place where you're considering maybe being a doula or something else like that. What is it that you do day-to-day right now that gives you the most joy?

Abigail Otwell:
Well, I'll just tell you our daily schedule. It's pretty much the same every day. The alarm goes off at 6:30 and we set the alarm in the kids' room to keep them in bed till 6:30. It's like the opposite.

Matt Stauffer:
[laughs] It's the opposite, right.

Abigail Otwell:
It's the opposite. As soon as that alarm goes off, it's like elephants upstairs, just like “Shh”, just running as fast I can downstairs. They like to get up early. Then, get them ready, give them breakfast, get them ready for school, drop them off. Then I go, I normally go to the gym just about every day, straight from dropping them off. I work out and then I come home and shower. Sometimes, Taylor and I will go eat lunch together, and that's nice to be able to do that, to be able to just chat and see each other. Then, we go get the kids at 3:00, and they're home, and fix dinner.

On Tuesdays, my daughter has dance and my son has basketball, so he'll take him to basketball practice and I'll take her to dance. We really like having our family time at night and I don't want to give that up. Anything that's going to take us away from the house for more than two nights a week, I'm not going to do it. It's not worth it, no. I just like having that time and they're so exhausted from being at school all day. School is really tough, especially now, it's just there's so much.

Matt Stauffer:
In what ways do you think your life is different, with Taylor running Laravel, versus if he had a normal 9-to-5?

Abigail Otwell:
Let me think. When he had a normal job, I felt a lot more alone. Of course, I had a little kid, but I don't know, just waiting for him to get home was my day, basically. I really like being able to go and travel more, that's really -- I love to travel. I think it's because we never did as a family at home, so it's something I really, really, really want to do with my kids, and they really love it and look forward to it. I don't know, when you're away from home and the kids are not infants, it's just like you can really cut loose and just -- there's not really any responsibilities, it's less stressful. You could just have fun and eat junk food and just [laughs] You know what I mean? Just really cut loose and have fun.

I really enjoy that and I'm glad he can not have to just have one week a year that we have to squeeze our thing into. When the kids were little, it was nice because if one of us had a doctor's appointment, I could leave the other one with him, they could set up here in his office or whatever. That helped out a lot, not having to hold them everywhere I went throughout the day.

Matt Stauffer:
He went from that job, he went over to UserScape. When he was first talking about going full-time on Laravel, was that scary? What was it like for you?

Abigail Otwell:
It was a little scary, but he is extremely responsible, so I knew that if he felt okay with it, that it was going to be okay, probably. [laughs] And he waited until it was well-established, so it wasn't terribly scary, it was more just super exciting because when we were first married, for the first couple of years, I remember we would walk around our little duplex and we would just chat about -- have ideas and stuff that he could do to be able to work for himself, so that we could be together more. It was just like this pipe dream at that point, it was just like, "This will never happen, but it's kind of fun talking about it." He tried a few other little things before that we laugh at now because they're hilarious, but when he made Laravel, it wasn't one of those ideas that he thought would be really used, it was more like, "Hey, I don't like anything that's out there. I'm just going to build my own for me to use."

Then, I remember the day he launched it and it was like, "Oh my gosh, Abigail, I've got --" I don't know, just a couple or stars or whatever one can have, and he was so excited. He was just really pumped about that and just, I don't know, just from there, we -- I remember he would get a retweet from somebody with 1,500 followers, and he'd be like, "Oh my gosh, can you imagine if one person retweets it with that many followers and then 1,500 people see it and then one of them retweets it?" It was just crazy. But yes, so when he went on his own, I felt pretty good about it. I've always told him, I said, "If all this goes away tomorrow and we're living in a cardboard box, I'll still love you. We have each other, that's what matters, so we'll figure it out." Of course, that's not going to happen because he's responsible and has everything figured out, but he was. Yes, so it's pretty cool.

Matt Stauffer:
You're technically not the primary entrepreneur, you're not the name who's behind the framework, you didn't code it. Someone could just say, "Hey, it's Taylor's idea and what you did was give him breathing room to do it." But I don't think that would be a full description of the situation. As an entrepreneur with an incredibly supportive spouse, who's a business partner with another entrepreneur who has a very supportive spouse, I'm very aware of how much our spouses are a part of the work we're doing, even if their fingers might not be in everything.

Are there any aspects of what it feels like to not just be a supportive spouse, but to be a co-entrepreneur that you could talk a little bit about? I know that's a little bit of a vague question, but do you have any sense of the ways in which you see yourself being a part of Laravel, versus just watching Taylor do it?

Abigail Otwell:
Yes. Ever since I was little, I've been an entrepreneur. I love talking about small business ideas, I have had many little businesses over the years, ever since I was pretty little of my own, so I really love talking about the subject, whether it pertains to me or to somebody else. I love hearing other people's ideas, and dreaming about stuff. I often ask him -- I can't give away any secrets, so I've got to be careful here, but [laughs] I'll often ask him, "How's such and such coming?" I try to keep up and keep interested because I am interested. Even though I can't use it or whatever, I still am interested in the process and how it's coming.

When things are really, really busy, like getting ready for Laracon, I just know in my mind he's going to need more time. I'll need to give him that time, and it's just a season, it may be busier, he may have to work a Saturday or Sunday here and there, or bring his laptop down after the kids are in bed and work a little bit, but I just know it's a season and it'll pass, and things will calm back down. That way, I try to give him time and space to create, but I also like to talk to him about it, try and stay interested in it and stay up on the latest programs. Also, I try to give him ideas here and there, where I can. I know once he incorporated one of my ideas in Forge, which was kind of cool. For security, but-

Matt Stauffer:
Are you familiar with the phrase "rubber duck debugging"?

Abigail Otwell:
No.

Matt Stauffer:
There's an idea in coding that when you're stuck or something's not working, one of the best ways to solve the problem is to talk to somebody about it, but it turns out it's not often what the other person is telling you that's helping, but just the process of talking through with someone. At Titan, we all have a little -- somebody in a book once said, "You could literally just stick a rubber duck on your desk," and so, you all who can't see, I just pulled a rubber duck off my desk. You could just sit there and talk to a rubber duck and I've realized that I use my wife as a rubber duck often, expecting that she'll just kind of smile and nod and then, like you said, she'll have really -- as a non-technical person, she'll have fantastic input about user behavior or what would look like for -- And I'm like, "I'm glad I used you instead of a rubber duck because this is way better."

It sounds like you're not just rubber duck, although that is a thing, where you're really listening, but you're actively involved in some of the processes of thinking through stuff.

Abigail Otwell:
Yes, and I try to be, and if there's any way, I'm always telling him, "If there's any way I can help you with the conferences." I looked up videos for him and I was like, "I can just take over contacting the venues and getting food lined up," and so, just trying to take anything I can off his plate. He ends up doing most of it himself and does a great job at it, but I do try to help out here and there with that kind of stuff. Because I'm like, "I can do that." [laughs]

Matt Stauffer:
Sure, sure. All right, so one of the things I noticed is that you have had a little bit of social media interaction with various folks in the Twitter world and the Laravel world. You're on Twitter at times and we'll see you at conferences along with the kids, although you're usually taking care of the kids a little bit more in those contexts. What does it feel like to have a whole bunch of people interact with you and following you primarily because they're developers and just random people from countries around the world following you? Is it weird, is it kind of fun, do you have any idea what they're actually talking about?

Abigail Otwell:
It is a little funny because I'll tweet something and I'll be like, "Wait a minute, that was totally the wrong crowd for that." Because nobody's going to care in this crowd. But yes.

Matt Stauffer:
Some things go on Facebook, some things go on Twitter.

Abigail Otwell:
Right, exactly, yes. Although I have been trying to step away more from Facebook, Instagram. I'll delete Instagram for a while, then download it, post a picture and then, delete it again. It's just, I don't know, it's just so much to keep up with and sometimes, I just need a break. Anyway, yes, it is kind of funny to open Twitter and it's -- Twitter and Facebook are totally different worlds. Both politically and just everything. Everything is totally separate. Everybody I follow just about on Twitter is tech people, and I think everybody that follows me is tech people, so sometimes I have to keep that in mind, I'm like -- Then I feel like -- I don't tweet very often because I'm like, "What would I have to offer to this crowd? I don't know what to say." [laughs]

Matt Stauffer:
I know that feeling. Often, I also find myself saying, "You know what? I'm a whole human being and regardless of whether you followed me for one thing or another, this is who I am." I try to remind myself to self-censor a little bit less and just be like, "You know what? If you don't like this part of me, you can go follow somebody else who talks about just the tech you care about or whatever." [inaudible 00:28:50]

Matt Stauffer:
Right, yes. You're following me, then you're going to get me.

Abigail Otwell:
[laughs] If you don't like me, there's an unfollow button. [laughs]

Matt Stauffer:
Nice. All right, so if there were a Laracon in a different country in the world that you are most interested in visiting, somebody should go spin up this Laracon just to give you the excuse to travel with Taylor, which one would it be?

Abigail Otwell:
I think there's a huge Laravel group, is it -- Okay, where -- he was just telling me the other day there's -- one of the biggest Laravel groups there are, is somewhere like that. Is that Brazil or Costa Rica? I don't know, but-

Matt Stauffer:
There's definitely a big group in Brazil, for sure.

Abigail Otwell:
Yes, I think it may be that, but he pulled up and I was like, "Okay, I will go there." [laughs]

Matt Stauffer:
[laughs] All right. All right, so if you're listening and you have a large Laravel community in a tropical location, you might get some special-

Abigail Otwell:
I will be there. [laughs]

Matt Stauffer:
-special bonus points behind your conference

Abigail Otwell:
Yes, for sure.

Matt Stauffer:
I like that. You are technical, you understand technical things, but I think that your perspective on the apps that Taylor's building and the technical stuff he's doing can often just as, A, not being the one writing the code, and B, not someone who dreams of architecture design patterns all day, I would bet it gives you a little bit of a broader perspective than some of us can have at times, when we're stuck in code.

I got two questions around that. Number one, what, either, is the best thing you've seen come out of the Laravel community or the best hope you have for the Laravel community on a broader perspective? Two, do you have any worries or correctives or things you -- warnings you want to give or things you want to tell people, "Hey, make sure you stay away from it?" I know it's kind of broad and vague, but basically, what are your hopes and dreams or what are your fears, from a broader perspective, for Laravel, as a framework, as a community, as its possible impacts and all that kind of stuff?

Abigail Otwell:
One thing I was really surprised about the first time I came to Laracon, which would have been the first year, in Louisville, so it was three years ago, I guess?

Matt Stauffer:
I think so.

Abigail Otwell:
Before then, my kids were so little and dependent on me. There was no way I was going to be able to leave them and go to these conferences, even though I really, really wanted to. It was the first year, we actually all went and brought his mom to that one, but now I'm able to go. I was really pleasantly surprised by just how -- just these people, they were just so friendly, and happy, and welcoming, and just really, they were -- everyone was so excited about it. It made me really excited for the future of Laravel and just to see the culmination of all his work, because I see the grueling day-to-day stress and just hard work and extra hours.

To see it like always feel using it and all these cool stories of people being able to quit their jobs and work from home with their families because of it, that, to me, was so rewarding, very, very rewarding. Even though I wasn't technical, I still felt like I made a lot of friends and still talk to a ton of people. Yes, I really love that. As far as the warnings go, I don't know. I don't know, I think it's -- I feel like the Twitter fighting has kind of died down a little bit.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes, it does seem like it.

Abigail Otwell:
Maybe I'm just kind of in a hole, but-
[laughter]

Matt Stauffer:
No, I think it's either died down or-

Abigail Otwell:
I don't really go and read it that often.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes, or I've just muted everybody, I'm not sure which.

Abigail Otwell:
Yes, one of the two. I don't know, lately, I think have been going pretty well, as far as that goes and everything.

Matt Stauffer:
Cool. No, I like the idea that you said about -- I mean, when I was asking about the impact it's had on your life, you described a lot of impacts on quality of life for your family. When you described the impacts it's had on other people, it was a similar thing, it was quality of life, and self-determination, and family time, stuff like that, and it's cool for that. I never want to be the one who pits financial success against those sorts of things because, often, financial success gives you freedom and gives you the ability to do that.

Abigail Otwell:
It does.

Matt Stauffer:
We could have said, "Oh, you know what? The really good thing is that lots of people are making lots of money or lots of people are getting famous or rich or whatever," which are not bad things, but again, I love that one of the vibes is for people to live the life that they want to live. That's something I've heard you talk about a lot here, which I think is really cool.

Abigail Otwell:
Yes. That, to me, is -- I mean, that's really all there is. Family and just being able to -- I don't know. I think it's just coming from where I come from, I think it's -- that's so important to me, is just spending a lot of family time. I love that the kids can come in and see Taylor after school and -- I mean, I try to keep that at a minimum because I know he's working, but he'll often let them come in and say hi. Then, within two hours, he's downstairs for dinner. It's just really enriched our family life so much, having him home and working for himself and it's really cool to see that happen in other people's life, especially as a direct product of Laravel. I think that's really cool to me.

Matt Stauffer:
I love it. I think that's a good point to stop on because it makes -- it gives you all the feel [unintelligible 00:34:04] -- This has been amazing. I really appreciate you taking your time here. If people who listen to this were to take one action in their lives or in the Lavarel community or something in response to this, one thing. Some people, it's, "Hey, follow me on Twitter." Is there one thing that they did in response to hearing you talk with -- what would that one thing be?

Abigail Otwell:
Just enjoy each other. Just, I don't know, just try not to get bogged down in the day-to-day or the stress, the arguments. Just to really try to enjoy your family, and spend time with them and -- I don't know because, in the end, that's really all that matters, I guess.

Matt Stauffer:
I love it. That's great.

Abigail Otwell:
Well, I appreciate you asking me. Nobody has really asked me to be on these things before, so I was a little nervous. I was like, "What I'm going to say?" You're easy to talk to.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes. That's what it says, it's about you, it's not about saying the right thing or teaching the right thing, it's just -- there's people behind all this. The hope is to get to know the people. A lot of people, again, they know your name, they might not know you. Hopefully, they know you a little bit more and you'll have even more friends at next Laracon.
[laughter]

Matt Stauffer:
Cool. Well, Abigail, thank you so much for your time. It was a total pleasure talking to you and see you later.

Welcome back to the Laravel podcast. This is season three where we're doing interviews. It's the people you know—getting to know aspects of them you never understood. Or it's also finding some people who you probably have used their tools or you've seen them but you don't actually, necessarily know who they are. Those names who you've been putting in GitHub require or to Composer require for ages but never actually known who the person is.
The guy we have in front of us today, I'm actually curious to see what his entire history of working with Laravel is, but the current most present one that's going on right now is connecting Laravel to chatbots and slackbots, and all that kind of stuff, and this is called BotMan but there's a lot more going on here.
First of all, we start with the point where I massacre somebody's name and then we move on to the next point where I ask that person to say their name correctly and then introduce themselves a little bit. Marcel Pociot, that's close, not perfect. He's still smiling, so I didn't massacre it too badly. Can you tell us-- and I'm probably ending up calling you just Marcel through this podcast.

Marcel Pociot: Yes, that's fine.

Matt Stauffer: That's because it is easier for me to say. Thank You. Can you tell us a little bit about-- just real quick, you don't have to tell us your whole life story, I'll ask those questions but—who are you? What are you doing? What are you about? What's BotMan? What is your new company? Just give us the basics of what should we know about you.

Marcel Pociot: Okay. Yes, my name is Marcel Pociot. I think that's at least the German pronunciation. I co-founded a company in December last year.

Matt Stauffer: Congratulations.

Marcel Pociot: Thank you. Very fresh still. I think you're one of the first people that I actually tell this in person that's not from my family-

Matt Stauffer: I got the insider track then.
[laughter]

Marcel Pociot: -and friends because the website isn't finished yet. Yes. I think I'm quite around in the Laravel community for a bit.

Matt Stauffer: You've been working-- I've known you just generally in the Laravel community, but you're one of those people where I know that I've known you but I don't even know how we originally connected. Now, you mentioned that we spoke together at a conference so that it may have been it, but do you have any early claim to fame in the Laravel community? Were there any packages that you did earlier on it that were more popular or is it just that you've been around for a while that you're known? Do you know?

Marcel Pociot: Well, I did a few. There is one, I think it's called teamwork, for some user/team association package.

Matt Stauffer: I remember that.

Marcel Pociot: But they're all a bit older.

Matt Stauffer: Where did first start using Laravel?

Marcel Pociot: Two and a half years ago, I think. I wasn't doing that much PHP back in the days, at least not with frameworks. At the companies I work with, they were using self-built frameworks which are usually crap. You do this once in your lifetime and never again. Well, I ended up at companies that did it all the time. At one point, we decided that we’d built a SaaS application and we were looking for framework to use.
This is pretty much the story I tell everyone when they ask me how I got into Laravel. My boss was really into Zend because of the whole Zend ecosystem, with the Zend Studio and the Zend server. I looked into the Zend framework, I think it was two. I gave it a week, I gave it really my best shot. I even bought a book and to gave it a try. In the meantime, I looked around for other frameworks and discovered Laravel. What I did with Zend framework in a week, I did with Laravel in an hour in the evening on the couch. This was the main motivation to use Laravel then.

Matt Stauffer: Got it. Okay. I do remember that one of the things that, originally I saw, is that you were doing the Laravel notifications thing. Did you help co-manage that?

Marcel Pociot: Yes.

Matt Stauffer: Or manage or-

Marcel Pociot: With Mohamed and Freek, yes.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. Cool. Got it. Stepping back for a second, it's so funny because I try not to go too deep in my own ethnological and linguistic curiosities in the podcasts because nobody else isn't quite as interested as I am, so one of the things I actually ask myself before we were on a call is how was your English so good, we went to that little bit but I must admit that based on your name, it's sounds French to me, but I know that you live in Germany. Are you French origin living in Germany or I'm I just totally?

Marcel Pociot: No. I hear that a lot. I think it's also because of my first name. People try to pronounce it French, like Marcel Pociot or something like that.

Matt Stauffer: That's exactly what I expected you to say when you first told me, yes.

Marcel Pociot: As far as I can tell, the name-- we can't trace it back that much. I think it's just two generations and it's from Eastern Europe, so that's pretty much all I can say.

Matt Stauffer: Okay, but you're German, you live in-- where do you live in Germany?

Marcel Pociot: Near Dusseldorf, which is near Cologne so, yes.

Matt Stauffer: I took a little bit of German in high school and college and probably forgot the majority of it, but just enough that I can read a couple of German story books to my kids and to try to get a little bit of German heritage in for them. My sister was in a little bookstore, a local bookstore and found this-- what's it called? It's like sweet dreams or something like that - Träumt Suss?

Marcel Pociot: Susse Träume?

Matt Stauffer: Anyway, it's this cute little blue book so I read it to my son over and over and over again, and my pronunciation was really bad at day one, but over time I got good at it. Then at some point, my wife found the exact same book in English and so now, with both of my kids, I read them both of the books back and forth, but my daughter is understanding enough English right now that when I read the German version to her she's like, "Wait a minute, I don't understand this one". She gets mad at me [laughs] because she prefers the English version. Anyway, cool. I do remember there was another big one, the API documentation generator, tell me a little bit about that project.

Marcel Pociot: Well, it's a tool that you can pull into your Laravel application and it will basically just reads the routes that you define, so you can call it and give it the prefix of the routes that you want documentation for and will scan the routes and create this Stripe like documentation. So that you have the documentation on the left and then code examples how you can interact with the API on the right, and it does it by just pausing the routes and then reading the documentation of the code.

Matt Stauffer: Is it its own thing or is generating like one of the preexisting styles? You know what I mean? Because I've never got to use it, but we are always looking for API documentation generators.

Marcel Pociot: It's a theme that's called slate, so it's using this.

Matt Stauffer: Cool. Very cool. I’ll put links in the show notes. But the main two that I see associated with your name right now are the API doc generator and then, of course, BotMan, which we'll talk about in a minute. Those are the things and then we've got your company.
Let's real quick talk about what is BotMan, where did it come from and then also, what's your company and then we're going to dig into the back story. BotMan, what is BotMan? What does it do and where did it come from?

Marcel Pociot: Okay, I'll start with where it came from. It was really just coincidence. Late 2016, Slack announced that they now have a new HTTP based API, it's called event API. Basically, before that when you wanted to react to Slack events, like new messages, you had to connect through web sockets and the new API was basically just webhooks. Whenever a new action appears-- yes. Well, I mean, if you have a large Slack team it will blast a lot of events to your server.
When I heard that Slack announced this API, I just thought that it would be cool to have a PHP API that wraps around it and have an elegant API around it, it's sort of what Laravel is all about, then apply this to Slack.
Then I did this, I open sourced it. It was called just SlackBot at the time. It lay around there for three or four months, I didn't do anything with it and then, I came up with the idea that it might be cool to connect multiple services to it, not just Slack, but also Telegram and Facebook Messenger. That's the main thing with BotMan. It's one of the only-- maybe it's the only —PHP library that actually allows you to connect to multiple messenger services.

Matt Stauffer: Yes. If it not the only, it's the only one that matters. That's what I think. [laughs]

Marcel Pociot: It allows you to connect to these services with one API and reuse your code.

Matt Stauffer: One of the hardest things for people to think about, chatbots— everyone hears "Chatbot is the cool new thing", whatever and often, it's really difficult to understand in what context would I actually want to use this, what are some--? Some of the simplest ones we've seen are, "Oh well, when I hook into a CodeShip integration, something that already exists but, what are some of the-- either in your personal use of it or in seeing other people use it, what are some of the most compelling uses of chatbots? Whether it's in Slack or Telegram, or whatever else that you've seen to help people's imagination get started a little.

Marcel Pociot: Yes, I think the problem is that people always associate chatbots with these super artificial intelligence systems that understand whatever the user wants. In my opinion, it's just a different interface for your application. It's a conversational interface for your application and what I've seen that was built with BotMan, a lot is like websites, for example, for insurance companies. On their website, they have this chat bubble, that you know maybe from Intercom, and what it does is it guides you through the website. When you click on a button, the chatbot opens and asks you a question related to the action that you triggered when you clicked on the button. That's one-use case and I think-

Matt Stauffer: I want to stop you for a second. When I think of a chatbot, what I think about is something that allows someone to use a preexisting chat system, like Facebook Messenger or something else, to interact with their backend API. What you're describing sounds like an entirely manual process where you just used webhooks to hook in your app, right? Am I missing what you're talking about?

Marcel Pociot: No. That's also possible. With BotMan, it is the web drivers, so you can just connect it to your own API and then you send the message from your user to your own API and reply back.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. Got it.

Marcel Pociot: But in the end, that's what happens with Telegram or Facebook too. Yes.

Matt Stauffer: So really, anything that has to do with sending and receiving messages to your user in a chat-like format.

Marcel Pociot: Yes, right.

Matt Stauffer: Regardless of which chat format they're usbing. Okay. I think the on page one is just so clear of an example. Everyone has used a website with Intercom on it or one of Intercom's competitors at some point. I get that one. I think that's super compelling. I'm happy to know that if I need to build that, still reach for BotMan, that's cool. I wouldn't have known that until you said that.
Have you seen people use-- I think the hard thing for me is that when I think about Telegram or when I think about Facebook Messenger, I very infrequently think about interacting with someone who has enough money to have an API. I think of my friends. I'm sending a message to my friend, my friend messages me back.
Have you seen or heard of really compelling use cases where people are using traditional chats systems, outside of Slack? We'll talk about Slack in a second, but has anybody done anything interesting that you know of with Telegram or Messenger or are those little more aspirational at this point?

Marcel Pociot: Messenger is used a lot for more marketing kind of services. For example, TechCrunch has this, well, it's a chatbot where you can-- when you sign up you can register for different topics from their RSS feeds.

Matt Stauffer: Intere-- wow.

Marcel Pociot: Then you get-

Matt Stauffer: They are using it to publish information out and people are subscribing.

Marcel Pociot: Yes, every evening-- so you can select topics and then the time. Every evening, I get the top 10 stories from TechCrunch into the Messenger.

Matt Stauffer: You just blew my mind. My son just started a podcast www.stauffersonscience.com, and I have a whole bunch of people who I grew up with, who are completely un-computer savvy and they're all saying, "How do I subscribe to a podcast?", I'm like, "Oh Gosh, how am I going to handle this?". I could build a little light Laravel or Lumen app that subscribes to the RSS feed of the podcast and allows people to enter their-- authenticate their Messenger information and pushes every new episode to their Messenger inbox.

Marcel Pociot: Yes, right.

Matt Stauffer: Holy crap, you just blew my mind. That's amazing. That is so cool, that's so clever. That opens up so many things for people to subscribe because everybody, all your non-tech savvy friends, your mom, your grandma, all of them, they all have Facebook which means they all have Messenger.

Marcel Pociot: Yes. I think even more like the younger generation because they don't have MacBooks or laptops, they just have smartphone and use Messenger to communicate.

Matt Stauffer: Do you know-- I'm sorry I'm just going into the weeds here, but I am so fascinated. If somebody doesn't use Messenger and they send something to a Messenger authenticated thing, does it show up on the web interface in their little messages thing in Facebook website?

Marcel Pociot: You mean if they don't use the Messenger application?

Matt Stauffer: Like if somebody doesn't have an iPhone but they go to facebook.com on their browser every day, can they do Messenger interactions using the little-

Marcel Pociot: Yes.

Matt Stauffer: Okay, so it's the same thing as Facebook. Man, I need to pause for a moment, this is so cool. Okay, broadcasting makes a ton of sense. Broadcasting information, this—in some ways, you have some of the value but a lot more configurability of like an RSS feed through a multiple-medium subscription. That makes a ton of sense and I get that now.

Marcel Pociot: Plus, I think. maybe this will change over time, but right now the click rates are much higher because it's not that overused as e-mail newsletters. For example, with the TechCrunch-

Matt Stauffer: They feel more personal too?

Marcel Pociot: Yes. It feels-- even though you know that you're not actually talking to someone at the company, it feels like you're interacting with the company, well, with its brand. The whole market taking thing is really popular on Facebook, also for artists, they have chatbots that you can ask, "where's the next concert?", and the user feels like they are talking to, I don't know, Beyoncé, whatever.

Matt Stauffer: Interesting. I was just going to ask about questions. That one right there would feel like a little bit of natural language processing. If you can do some of that then you can have like ask questions of our whatever bot, or whatever, and that makes sense too.
You imagine that you are working for some big company, like an insurance company maybe, and they say, "You want to ask us a question? Here, hook up to our messenger bot and you can ask--" blah, blah, blah. The messenger bot parses out using some basic natural language processing. So, the messenger bot is basically BotMan hooked in your API. The API, your Laravel app takes the questions tries to process them, tries to look up an answer and then sends the message back to that person. So that BotMan would be the interface layer in between.

Marcel Pociot: Yes, right.

Matt Stauffer: Okay, that makes sense. Slack makes the most sense for our context. I think we're all sitting and using cycle work every day, and it seems like Slack is adding more and more things you can do every time. Buttons at the bottom and stuff like that. What is the most interesting thing that you have built or seen built with Slack integrations on BotMan?

Marcel Pociot: It's also interesting because Slack got-- I think they moved away from the term chatbots a while ago, and I think they just called it application. They even integrated like forms that open up, like select boxes, drop downs. I haven't seen that many slackbots using BotMan. There's one, I forgot the name who built it, but he built a slack game, it's like a dice rolling game, it's called Liar's dice.

Matt Stauffer: I, obviously, could talk about BotMan the whole time. But this isn't actually about BotMan, this is about you. BotMan is amazing, there's all sorts of interesting stuff. You also have given-- do you know if your Laravel EU talk is online? I didn't actually watch those.

Marcel Pociot: Yes, it's online.

Matt Stauffer: Okay, great. I'll put a link up to your BotMan talk which is called From zero to multi-platform Chatbot with BotMan. I'll put the link up to that one as well.
Let's move on to you. The first place I always start with everybody is, when did you first get interested in computers? Or when did you first get access to a computer? What did your original kind of exposure to computers?

Marcel Pociot: I think the first memory that I have from a computer was, I was sitting, I might be like 6 or 7, sitting in the living room with my father, and I don't remember what kind of computer it was. But we had a book with games, so if you wanted to play a game that was the source code of the game in the book.

Matt Stauffer: Was it BASIC?

Marcel Pociot: Yes, it was. You had to type it in and then you got the game. What I remember, maybe that's also the reason why I remembered it is, my father was sitting there and typing everything in, and I just came at the power adapter and the whole thing crashed. [laughter] He was frustrated.

Matt Stauffer: Yes, I believe it. I assume that was like one of those black and green old-- those boxes. Very cool.

Marcel Pociot: This is the first memory of sitting in front of a computer.

Matt Stauffer: I try not to call at people's ages too much, but I think that you're around my age, around 33, is that right?

Marcel Pociot: Yes. 32 and in April 33.

Matt Stauffer: We're almost exactly the same age. In our generation it was not all that common, at least in the US, I don't know about Germany, for people to have a home computer when we were that young. Since your father was the one doing this. Was your father-- was he a geek or is he a programmer?

Marcel Pociot: Not at all, no. He was always interested in it, but well not so much that he really wanted to write more code than there was in the book. [laughs]

Matt Stauffer: At what point did your interaction with the computer go from pulling out the plug from your dad typing in BASIC program to you creating things on your own?

Marcel Pociot: I think it was-- in school we had, at the programming class, we wrote Turbo Pascal.

Matt Stauffer: Wait, what age of school are you talking about?

Marcel Pociot: I think this is seventh grade, so I must have been like 12, 13.

Matt Stauffer: You had programming class when you were 13 years old?

Marcel Pociot: Yes.

Matt Stauffer: That's fascinating. When I was in seventh grade, we had typing class and I-

Marcel Pociot: With typewriters or--?

Matt Stauffer: They were on Macs, but they were old Macs and we'd all sit around and I would finish the Mavis Beacon thing in five minutes and then I'd go try to learn Applescript and write programs that would infect all the other computers in the network and shut them all down at the same time without the teacher noticing, but there's no formal programming education even in high school.
The best we had was an engineering class where the teacher would let us go hack around and stuff, but certainly, nothing formal. So, you learned Turbo Pascal in seventh grade?

Marcel Pociot: Yes, pretty much and then-

Matt Stauffer: How did that go?

Marcel Pociot: Well, I think we moved quite fast from there to Delphi where also-- in the class, there were a handful of people that were always very fast with all the tasks and, just as you said, had a lot of time. We developed like a Trojan, a Trojan Horse [laughter] to open the CD trays from the other computers and stuff like that.

Matt Stauffer: Exactly. That's exactly what I was trying to do. That's awesome. Okay, early on you were deep in the computers, you were writing code, you were hacking at it. When did you first get into the web?

Marcel Pociot: I don't really remember what age I was, but it was like the Geocities sites. All this crappy--

Matt Stauffer: Yes, man. I still remember, mine was MA slash 1984. My first two letters in my name and then the birth year. [laughter] What was your first Geocities site, you remember?

Marcel Pociot: No, I just remember that I had this cool hacker name.

Matt Stauffer: What? Like 1337 speak??

Marcel Pociot: Yes.

Matt Stauffer: One, three, three, seven, four, four, whatever.

Marcel Pociot: It was Delta2K, I don't know.

Matt Stauffer: Nice.

Marcel Pociot: It sounded cool.

Matt Stauffer: Yes, of course, with 2k especially. Okay, it's funny because it seems like I'm either picking people to interview who are old head PHP dorks or there's something consistent about folks who are helping lead in our community that a lot of us are from similar generation. I'm curious to see where that goes, but-- you were doing that, you were playing around with it at the side, what did you study? Did you study that in university or--?

Marcel Pociot: No. Here in Germany after you finish school, you can either go to a university or you can do training. You go to a company and then you have three years at the company and besides working at the company, you also go to school.

Matt Stauffer: Is it a school provided by the government or provided by the company?

Marcel Pociot: No, it's just a public school for learning the-

Matt Stauffer: For that specific career?

Marcel Pociot: -specific profession. Yes.

Matt Stauffer: Got it, okay.

Marcel Pociot: I did that to become a software engineer and I ended up in a company in Bochum, here in Germany, and-

Matt Stauffer: I don't even know how to spell that. I’ll put that down on the show notes [laughs]. Okay, cool.

Marcel Pociot: Yes, that's what I did. I wasn't that much into liking school that much back in the days. So pretty early on, I decided to skip the school part and rather work five days a week, so that I can hack on some code. That's what I did and then just did the tasks on my own and learned from them on my own.

Matt Stauffer: Got it. You have a pretty straight line from being a little kid watching your dad enter QBASIC programs in. Through learning in school and doing your own Geocities stuff, to being a software engineer and going straight in the industry. Have you at any point felt like, "Oh my gosh, this is not what I want to do"? Or is it just been pretty clear since early on-

Marcel Pociot: Yes, it's been really clear since early on.

Matt Stauffer: - "I'm a programmer, this is my thing"?

Marcel Pociot: That's always what I wanted to do. It's always a bit funny when I talk to people that don't really know what they want to do with their lives and what direction they want to go because it was always really clear for me that I want to go to that direction.

Matt Stauffer: Interesting. If you today-- and I know that you just started your own company in December, so hopefully this is really fresh in your head. If you today were to be able to pick exactly what you were doing day to day, if your company was successful in exactly all the ways you want it to be, what would you be doing with your time?

Marcel Pociot: Right now, I would say I would still love to write code. I heard that you talked about this also with a few other people, what to do when you're 40 or 50 years old. Well, right now, I would say that I hope that I still want to write code at that time

Matt Stauffer: If you found yourself in a situation where your company just-- and we will talk about you company in a second, but you just took off and it's going really well. You decide to hire five people and all the sudden, you're spending all your time doing administrative work. At that point, you think you might say, "I gotta fix this, I got to get back into the code"? Is that your sense of it right now?

Marcel Pociot: Right now, it is, yes, but I'm just so refreshed and I'm really just coming from a lead developer role.

Matt Stauffer: Yes. Okay. All right. Tell me about your company. You went right into that internship, what's your work history look like? You don't have to tell me every company, but what kind of stuff you've been doing. Have you been working primarily for software firms or have you've been working for non-software companies as a software programmer?

Marcel Pociot: No. I just worked for agencies, like web agencies.

Matt Stauffer: Got it.

Marcel Pociot: The first one was very small, four people when I started there which was very cool because I got to do everything. I had to talk to customers and the clients. We had-- it was very small so we had to do things like setting up e-mail accounts for them. They called if they couldn't set up the email account on their mobile phone. Then they would come in with their phone and stuff like that. Yes, the second company was also a bigger agency but still an agency, where I did-- At the first one, I did PHP and then I got a lot into Appcelerator Titanium.

Matt Stauffer: That's why I thought you'd done Titanium. Let's talk about Titanium for a second. Titanium, I feel like was one of the first used JavaScript to write multi-platform apps. How is it different and similar from something like Ionic?

Marcel Pociot: The main difference is that while Ionic is just html that gets executed on the phone in the browser, or in the web view, Titanium used the JavaScript code that you wrote and they had proxies for the native languages for java or Objective C. Then the JavaScript code would call the native proxy objects that would then execute native code. When you wanted [crosstalk]-

Matt Stauffer: It is more of like a predecessor of React Native.

Marcel Pociot: Yes, right. It's like-

Matt Stauffer: Okay. Got it. Is it still around?

Marcel Pociot: It is. The company got acquired and they still develop it but the time Facebook announced React Native, the community just ran away and went to Facebook, yes.

Matt Stauffer: Got it. Okay. I'm sorry, I interrupted. You were doing that at that company and then--? Continue.

Marcel Pociot: Yes. Titanium was also my main motivation to work on open source in the first place. I haven't done that before and I started developing Titanium modules. Just small user interfaces-

Matt Stauffer: Like packages.

Marcel Pociot: Yes. Right. User interface libraries to share and I put them open source and I think I did Titanium for, maybe, one and a half years. Mostly Titanium and then also some Java and Objective C to work on some native modules. During that time, I got bit away from PHP because also, at the time, there was no Composer. The whole ecosystem wasn't as stable as it is right now.

Matt Stauffer: Yes. What brought you back?

Marcel Pociot: Well, I think it was just a client project. [laughs]

Matt Stauffer: Okay. Did they say PHP or it was a web and you had to pick and you just pick PHP because you knew it?

Marcel Pociot: Yes, because I knew it and also because of React Native. When React Native was announced, Titanium just pretty much died.

Matt Stauffer: Yes. But that was pretty recently, right?

Marcel Pociot: Well--

Matt Stauffer: Like a year [crosstalk]

Marcel Pociot: No. Native is more around more than a year, I think.

Matt Stauffer: Is that real? I believe you, I don't actually know. Okay. Yes, let's say, it may be as long time as 2015 but-- because a lot of times when I hear people talk about "I stepped away from PHP--", blah, blah, blah, "and I finally came back", and they are in the Laravel community. A lot of them came back right around the time when Laravel 4 came out. Maybe I just got the timeline on that wrong in my head. When did Laravel 4 come out?

Marcel Pociot: When I started working with their Laravel, 5 came out. I think I worked with 4 for about a month.

Matt Stauffer: That is what I was expecting then. Okay.

Marcel Pociot: Yes. We started this SaaS product at our company and we chose to use Laravel 5 because-- I think the main reason was the form requests, which just blew my mind. I thought they were super cool to validate stuff and then we decided to pick up, there Laravel 5 during the development with the beta, there was no good decision.

Matt Stauffer: I didn't say and it was also bad decision.

Marcel Pociot: We had to fix several things every day and at some point we just pinned the dependency to one specific commit, so we knew, “okay, this is working”

Matt Stauffer: And you built against that commit until you released it until and then deal with all the fixes at once.

Marcel Pociot: And then it stays that way for a long time

Matt Stauffer: It's funny. This timeline does line up here is what I have seen, as four came out in 2013, five came out in 2015 and React Native was announced probably at some point in 2015. So you were deep in titanium, you were off in that world and interestingly you were doing a lot of other mobile stuff. You talked about getting into Java, getting into objective C a little bit it, so it was both Titanium, which is JavaScript but then also the adapter worlds, which means you got to know a little bit of Java from Android, a little objective C for Apple and then you all of a sudden come and jump back into PHP and it was Laravel 5, things were modern and Composer all that kind of stuff, were you still working for that same consultancy at that point?

Marcel Pociot: Yes, must have been sort of at the same time that I switched jobs, yes. And I didn't do that-- I always did PHP in the afternoon on the couch

Matt Stauffer: Got it. It was still always like your fun time favorite language because I know a lot of people would say they left, they're like "oh well, I got tired of PHP I left for rails, I got tired of PHP and I left for .NET or whatever, so you still had a soft spot in your heart for PHP the whole time.

Marcel Pociot: Yes right, but not with the framework at the time.

Matt Stauffer: You ever rolled your own? You said your company rolled their own,

Marcel Pociot: Yes, of course.

Matt Stauffer: Does it have a name?

Marcel Pociot: No, it didn't really have a name, no.

Matt Stauffer: Never got that far?

Marcel Pociot: No.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. You got a pretty classic story here, obviously everyone's different but a lot of us left at some point a lot of us came back at some point but it's interesting for the amount of impact you have made with BotMan you came up to Laravel pretty recently and BotMan isn't really a Laravel framework either. I feel like it was tied to Laravel at some point, is it basically just a PHP framework that does it even have a Laravel convenience layer on top of it right now?

Marcel Pociot: Yes it does. It is framework agnostic but there's a piece that's called BotMan Studio which is basically a blank Laravel 5.5 installation with some additional BotMan service provider and additional commands, a Tinker page to play around with it but it's not tied to Laravel.

Matt Stauffer: Got it. Okay we've caught up, you switched consultancies, you got in Laravel 5, you built BotMan, you talked about how you built BotMan so let's talk about your company. We chatted on and off about it but let's pretend that we haven't chatted at all. In December you formed your own company, you went out on your own. Tell me about it, what's your motivation, what's your goal, what's your desire; what made you want to get out of working for other consultancies and start your own thing and what is your own thing?

Marcel Pociot: Okay. I'm not doing this alone, I'm doing this with a former colleague, he has been a freelancer for a year now already and already a year ago when he left the company, we were already thinking about doing something on our own and I think the main motivation was- when we started this SaaS application at our company, we thought about turning it into its own company, which they eventually did. I ended up sitting in a new office with my now business partner and the CEO from this new company and we basically sat together for 2 years, just the two of us working on the product and we just knew that the CEO back at the time was a sales person and- how can I put it, a sales person as the CEO of a software product is difficult. This was like the main motivation because we had a different idea of the product, the way we wanted to get with it and it didn't turn out into that direction so we thought that, well if we do something on our own, we can give it our best shot.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. Is it a similar product to what you originally planned but since it didn't go the way you originally planned you're going to go build, are you doing product work then?

Marcel Pociot: Right now the company is called Beyond Code and we are, it's sort of a split. We have, on the one hand, we do projects, project work mostly we try to do it for Chatbots obviously.

Matt Stauffer: Your consultancy that builds Chatbots for people as a part of what you're doing.

Marcel Pociot: Yes, right. On the other hand, we have BotMan as the library and we want to focus around building a whole product ecosystem around it so that it becomes easier for people to pick it up and use it like analytics, bot building systems.

Matt Stauffer: So Beyond Code GMBH, what does that stand for by the way? I've never known that. GMBH. I assume it means limited liability corporation but the Germany version.

Matt Stauffer: All right. I did okay. All right. Beyond Code is a consultancy that builds primarily applications that have Chatbots on them and also uses the finances that come from that to further build the ecosystem around BotMan which is a PHP framework agnostic library to make it easy to build the type of applications that Beyond Code is building for people. Right?

Marcel Pociot: Right. Exactly.

Matt Stauffer: It makes sense. It's like that, not quite, like the Discourse model where like hey, there's a free or then Wordpress model. There's a free piece of software, there's also the way to pay us to do it, the money that you pay us to do it makes the free piece software better. Everything fits and everything else. Okay. That totally makes sense. All right, that's going forward.
A success for the next couple years of your life would mean that the work that you're doing or consultancy work, the work you're doing for clients basically allows you to make BotMan better, is that the general?

Marcel Pociot: Yes.

Matt Stauffer: You mentioned analytics, you mention understanding what's going on. Are there any other big next goals or features or things that you want that you feel like you can share with us that aren't the secret sauce?

Marcel Pociot: No. Not that I can share them. No.

Matt Stauffer: Okay, cool. But you've got big plans, it's not just sitting where it is, it is something you want to grow.

Marcel Pociot: Yes.

Matt Stauffer: Okay, that's cool. I think that the ability to compellingly get someone excited about the possibilities with a Chatbot obviously is going to be a big part of your doing. I'm glad we had the opportunity for that. Like I said, I'm literally going to get off this call and go see how fast I can hack together something to send that one woman who went church with me growing up. Facebook Messenger notifications when my son's podcast goes out.
I'm super geeked about that. Okay, let's see. What else, what do you do in your free time? One of the things is that you have such a straight line through programming that I think that I want to know more about what is not programming you. What motivates you? I know you've got a family, I know you've got one kid?

Marcel Pociot: Yes, one kid.

Matt Stauffer: One kid. How old is your kid?

Marcel Pociot: Four.

Matt Stauffer: Four. Okay. Obviously spending time with your family is significant but whether with your family or on your own, what do you do outside of coding? What motivates you? What excites you? What do you do when you're away from the computer?

Marcel Pociot: I think I have to re-calibrate myself a bit because when I was working at the consultancy, what I was doing in the afternoon was BotMan and now I'm doing this during the day job.

Matt Stauffer: Actually I got to stop you for a second. You keep mentioning the afternoon as your free time, what does your schedule look like?

Marcel Pociot: It's mostly nine to five.

Matt Stauffer: When you say in the afternoon, do you mean after five?

Marcel Pociot: Yes, right. Sorry, in the evening.

Matt Stauffer: In the evening. Got it. Okay. What you mean is basically your free time, hacking time in your old job you're doing consultancy during the day and then BotMan stuff at night but now the BotMan is your day job. How do you reorient?

Marcel Pociot: Yes, I still have to figure that out myself. I'm not that much of like a sports person or anything. I think really my main motivation was to program still.

Matt Stauffer: You just love coding.

Marcel Pociot: Yes. Well and other than that it's mostly, beside my family of course, playing some video games but- yes.

Matt Stauffer: Yes. I'm not a gamer but I gotta ask what kind of games are, I don't even know what questions gamers ask, is it a PC or console that the question they would ask what game you are into?

Marcel Pociot: No, it is console but also it's funny and also a bit sad that I just realized that I'm getting old because I'm no longer good at these games. I no longer can play these games longer. I have always liked these big games that pull you in like big RPGs but now with a kid, I don't really have the time to do that.

Matt Stauffer: You don't have much time.

Marcel Pociot: I don't want to play for five consecutive hours and if I come back after a few days, I don't want an hour to find out where was I or what I'm supposed to do.

Matt Stauffer: That's why I loved Nintendo, that's one of many reasons why I love Nintendo. Because for people with families, Nintendo is good. A, because there's games that you can play with your kids, and also user interfaces you can play with the kids, but B, there's games that are like you can dip in and out.

Marcel Pociot: Yes, you can just pick them up and then play for half an hour and then your're done.

Matt Stauffer: Even Zelda as an extremely immersive game. You can still pick it up for 20 minutes here or there.

Marcel Pociot: That is also too big for me.

Matt Stauffer: Zelda is. I mean I can understand it. I've played more video games when I played through-- I'm not done with Zelda, but I played more video games when I first got the Switch and Zelda than I have in years. And even so, it was 20 minutes here and there. Because of the Switch, I just put it down and it just pauses it, but I hear you. Super Mario Odyssey is pretty small. And of course, Mario Kart I play with my son nearly every day.

Marcel Pociot: Yes, [laughs] me too, yes.

Matt Stauffer: Nice.

Marcel Pociot: So now we have this rule that we play every other day. [laughter].

Matt Stauffer: Yes, yes. Every night became a problem, so I was like, "You need to get off." The good thing is my son is super, super active. I was a lazy kid, I didn't want to do anything, I just wanted to sit around. My kid, if I let him, we would be outside running around every day, I don't don't have any problems.

Marcel Pociot: Yes, my son too. Yes, when I came home from work, usually the first thing that he would tell me was, "Okay, you can leave your shoes on, we go out and play some soccer."
[laughter]

Matt Stauffer: I love it, that's very cool. Yes, I think my biggest bummer about the neighborhood we live in right now is that-- the best thing about it is the houses are really close and everybody gets to know each other very well, so he's got tons of friends. But the bummer is the yards are so small that there's nowhere for us to play without getting in the car and driving somewhere. Like, play soccer or baseball or something like that. But what we end up doing is just running around in the house like crazy people anyway.

Marcel Pociot: [laughs].

Matt Stauffer: It's his favorite game right now.

Marcel Pociot: We have people living underneath so we can't do this all the time.

Matt Stauffer: My son's favorite game right now is turn on some music really loud, some really hype pop music or something like that, and then run around and chase each other and throw bouncy balls at each other or try to tickle each other or something like that while the music plays really loud. I'm like, "Okay."

Marcel Pociot: [laughs]. Yes, haven't done that in a while.

Matt Stauffer: What keeps you from getting stuck when you're coding? Or what tools do you use, or what book or what languages. How do you keep either on a single problem, or on a single framework, or single language? What broadens your perspectives? Whether it's in the programming world, like some other programming language, or whether it's something about your family or your life. What helps you keep your brain out of just the really narrow focus of, "I work in one language, one package, all day long." What gives you inspiration?

Marcel Pociot: Recently, when we had in mind that we're going to start the company, I focused a lot on the organizational things and on how to get this even up and running. During that time I was not that much focused on code, or on frameworks, or anything else, because it also meant for me just to get out of the comfort zone and start a company, and not have the safety as an employee. What I'm trying to tell is that, during this time, I sort of stepped away from being too close to the coding world a bit, and now I'm just catching up again. But I think it's mostly just talking to other people and exchanging with my business partner, things like that. It's not that I use other languages and look into them specifically to see new things, so it's not that I really have the plan on how to broaden my view. I don't know, I think it just happens this way. And if I'm stuck at a specific problem, I just try to go out for a bit and [chuckle] step away from the code.

Matt Stauffer: Yes. All right. I feel like I promised every time that I'm not going to say I could talk for hours and then I do it every time anyway. Oh well, I failed, I did it.

Marcel Pociot: [laughs].

Matt Stauffer: We are nearing time, so I don't want to start anything new and big. Are there any other big parts of you, your life, your motivation or your work that you feel like we haven't got a chance to cover?

Marcel Pociot: No, I think we covered the important parts, most of all, yes.

Matt Stauffer: Okay, I like it. What's your favorite candy?

Marcel Pociot: Candy? [laughs]. After the whole Christmas candy mess-- we set ourselves as a family goal to not eat any candy for a week.

Matt Stauffer: I like that.

Marcel Pociot: My son is doing great.

Matt Stauffer: [laughs]. He's doing better than you, huh?

Marcel Pociot: Yes, right.
[laughter]

Marcel Pociot: I cheated but he doesn't know.

Matt Stauffer: All right. Well, hopefully, he doesn't listen to this.

Marcel Pociot: Well, he doesn't understand English. So--

Matt Stauffer: There you go, that's the way to do it. Reveal your secrets in the other language.

Marcel Pociot: [laughs]. Yes.

Marcel Pociot: But other than that-- favorite candy-- I'm mostly into some sour candy.

Matt Stauffer: Like what?

Marcel Pociot: Skittles in sour, they're pretty good.

Matt Stauffer: Really? Skittle Sour-- I had no idea.

Marcel Pociot: Yes.

Matt Stauffer: All right, Skittle Sour, favorite candy.

Marcel Pociot: How about you?

Matt Stauffer: I ask this question to people all the time and I don't know if I know the answer. The first thing that came to my mind was Snickers. I think that I like candies with chocolate, and I think if it's chocolate plus some things that rounded it out, those are high in my list. I mean I really like Almond Joys, and Mounds as well. But I think Snickers is probably my top one.

Marcel Pociot: We all like bread with Nutella, but is it really candy?

Matt Stauffer: Yes, but I mean, it's basically candy.

Marcel Pociot: Yes. [laughs]. Yes.

Matt Stauffer: Yes. It's funny, my wife likes to put Nutella on sweet things. I'm like, "No, no, no, the Nutella is the sweet, I want it on bread or toast.", just plain piece of multi-grain bread, put some Nutella on top of it, good to go.

Marcel Pociot: And peanut butter, and then you basically have Snickers.

Matt Stauffer: Wait, do you put peanut butter and Nutella on the same thing?

Marcel Pociot: Sure. That's literally Snickers, right?

Matt Stauffer: Oh my god [whispers]. I had never thought of that. Alright last story and then I got to let you go. My dad worked for a German company when I was growing up, and he was the president of the US distributor of a German-based company. So he would fly over to Germany pretty frequently, and he would bring Levi's jeans and peanut butter to Germany, because it was hard for them to get, and he'd bring back German chocolate and Nutella, because it was hard for us to get. You can get Nutella in the grocery stores now, but back then you couldn't. And so, every time dad came home, we would get Nutella and we tried to keep these couple of jars of Nutella to last until the next time he went to Germany.

Marcel Pociot: Okay. Next time I see you, can you get some Nutella?

Matt Stauffer: Yes, I mean, we've got a lot of Nutella here, so you have to pick something up to trade with.

Marcel Pociot: But not the German one. [laughs].

Matt Stauffer: Yes, it's true, it's true. All right, Marcel, this was a ton of fun talking to you. Thanks for taking some time. Thank you for BotMan, I'm seriously going to go distribute my son's podcasts using it. So you can expect me to bother you with requests for help sometime soon.

Marcel Pociot: No problem. Thank you for inviting me.

Matt Stauffer: How can people follow you? And, I guess, go start BotMan. What is following after you look like?

Marcel Pociot: Well I think the easiest way to connect with me is on Twitter.

Matt Stauffer: All right. I'll make sure your handle is linked to the show notes.

Marcel Pociot: Okay. Or, if people want to talk about BotMan, I have the Slack team of BotMan where you can join, I think we're nearly 500 people in there.

Matt Stauffer: All right, we'll link that in the show notes too. Got it.

Marcel Pociot: Yes.

Matt Stauffer: Cool. All right, well thanks for your time, was a pleasure talking to you. Until next time everyone. See you later.

Matt Stauffer:
[music] Welcome back to The Laravel Podcast, this is your host Matt Stauffer. Today I'm going to be talking to someone whose name I struggle with, Antonio Ribeiro. He's the master of Stack Overflow Laravel and much more. Stay tuned. [music]

Welcome back to the Laravel podcast, season three. I'm your host. I wanted to say I'm your favorite host but I'm your only host so that'd be kind of cheating. Like when you only have one kid and you say "I'm your favorite kid". I'm your host. I'm one of your hosts. No, I'm the only host. See? Matt Stauffer. That's me. I'm the guy talking to you. Joining me is someone who a lot of you have probably learned from at some point in your life but you often haven't associated that you're actually learning from him. This is the master of Stack Overflow Laravel. That's what's going on here. And I think a lot of people have no recognized that this is actually a thing. We'll get into this in a bit.

His name, in Portuguese, is pronounced in such a way that I'm going to totally massacre it. So I'm going to say it and then literally the first thing I'm going to ask him to do is say it the way it's actually supposed to be said. So, Antonio Heb ... Ribeiro. No see, it's totally failed. Say your name for us. Also, what I'd love for you to do is just give us a picture of who are you, what are you about, when you meet someone for the first time what do you tell him about what you do, and then where are you? And then I'll get started in asking some questions.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Hi Matt. My name is Antonio Ribeiro.

Matt Stauffer:
Howdy. That's how badly I pronounced it.

Antonio Ribeiro:
No, no. The second time you say it was really cool.

Matt Stauffer:
It was a little better?

Antonio Ribeiro:
I'm from Brazil, originally. I work in Brazil and I work for a company outside Brazil. I lived in Europe for four years or five years. I don't remember exactly how much time. I lived in a city everybody knows. I think everybody knows. It's Rio de Janeiro. It as difficult as my name to say.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Exactly. I work for the Brazilian government. Specifically, the state legislature in Rio. So I'm a public service. I do six hour per day of public serving. Of work. And after-hours, I do a lot of work. I work for another company. Now, I'm not exactly working for them but I'm available for them. I love the program and that's why I got into Laravel so quickly and maybe had some success in Stack Overflow. So I started my programming life when I was 12, I think, in Switzerland, in a big department store working with computers that were in the store. I was amazed about computers. I got a job when I was 12, 13.

Matt Stauffer:
You got a job when you were 12 years old working on computers?

Antonio Ribeiro:
No, not working on computers. I got a job delivering groceries for a store.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh okay.

Antonio Ribeiro:
To buy a computer.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh nice! I was going to say. That's still impressive. Man, you're getting right into it here. You've heard this before and you know that I'm gonna ask about your whole background. But let me pause for just one second because what I want to make sure that I have is ... I want to have context for why it is that I'm talking to you.

And like I said, the whole point of this version of the podcast is to get to know the people who everybody knows but maybe they don't know who they are. Also, to get to know the people that nobody knows but they might have benefited from. I think you're in the second box. So, the reason that I originally met you is because I started Laravel. I don't know if you and I started at the same time or not ...

So actually before I go any further, what version of Laravel was it when you first started getting really involved?

Antonio Ribeiro:
3.2. Yeah, 3.2.

Matt Stauffer:
Yep, so you showed up there just a little bit before I did. I remember in the early days, and especially in the middle days, every time I'd come across everything in Stack Overflow, you would always be the answer. It's just consistently over and over. And I'm looking at this and you have 59,000 reputation on Stack Overflow. If anybody doesn't know, that's a very, very, very large number of answers. Who knows how good their ideas are here of how many people he's reached but it is telling me that he's reached 3.7 million people with his answers in Stack Overflow.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Wow. I didn't know that.

Matt Stauffer:
Right! And the large number of them are in Laravel. His top tag is in Laravel and then he's got Laravel 4. He's got 1,000 posts in Laravel that he's interacted with. Or that maybe even he's created. So there's a lot. There's a lot going on here. He's in the top 0.3% in Stack Overflow and I'm only saying that, not because that makes you worthwhile or not worthwhile, but that was the reason that we originally connected.

Now, since you've made a couple repositories in a couple packages for Laravel, the most recent ones that have come up have been your tracker, the Stats Tracker. Then the Test-Dashboard? Is that what it's called? I'm trying to remember what it's called.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yeah. I call it TDDD now.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh, it's got a new name. So TDDD.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yeah. TDDD.

Matt Stauffer:
Got it. Also, the one I've tweeted out a little bit recently is that you have Version. Which basically allows you to pull the version of your Laravel application into your app based on any number of criteria. One of which being the Git tag, which I was super interested in. But it seems like you got a lot more in those. Do you even know how many packages you have?

Antonio Ribeiro:
No. I'm not sure, really. I have, I think, five or six really popular packages but I have like 150 repositories in my account so I don't know.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. So you're big on Stack Overflow. You've got a lot of packages. You are also are a Twitter presence here and there. Just like a few of the other people we've talked to so far, you're not someone, at least in the US or Europe, where everybody knows you and everybody knows your name. I don't know the Brazilian Laravel community quite so well so is that different either in Brazil or Rio? Do you guys have a really strong community there that you're really invested and involved in? Or are you kind of solo with this?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yeah. I'm kind of solo because it all started for me in Stack Overflow.

Matt Stauffer:
Got it.

Antonio Ribeiro:
And in English, which is not exactly a language I used to speak. So I decided to go deep in this Stack Overflow thing but it was way before I discovered I was ranking on Stack Overflow.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Antonio Ribeiro:
So, I did not really contacted people in the Brazilian Laravel community but we got in touch via IRC when Taylor was still very frequent. I don't know if they are now because I'm not very frequent now.

Matt Stauffer:
Not so much, no.

Antonio Ribeiro:
I know some people of the Laravel community, Laravel.com.br, which is the website but I just saw that they kind of let it down. Unfortunately, the last posts on the websites-

Matt Stauffer:
2016.

Antonio Ribeiro:
2016, yeah. One of these days, someone asked me if I was going to do a Laraconf Brazil actually. I didn't even know that it was happening so-

Matt Stauffer:
Right.

Antonio Ribeiro:
I just say, "I'm sorry."

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, so you're relatively disconnected.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
I want to get your whole backstory but I want everybody to have the context for what we're talking about here. Do you use Laravel in your day job?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yes. Yes. Of course. Everything we do for the government, now, is done in Laravel.

Matt Stauffer:
Cool.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Mostly everything. I am a lead of a very small group of developers and we work primarily in Laravel. Laravel and VueJS.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh, very cool. Did you get in VueJS pretty early last summer or is it something you're jumping into more recently?

Antonio Ribeiro:
No, no. Pretty early

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. Cool.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Almost when Taylor started to talk about it, I got in.

Matt Stauffer:
Nice, very cool. It's interesting because I just googled your name so that I could throw your website into the show notes and found that you had done an interview on Laravel News. I try to read those beforehand so that I can make sure I'm not covering the same territory and I had never read that you've done that. I had no idea that happened. So, excuse me, I didn't do the research I should have done. But that's fine because I still have plenty of questions and curiosities.

Okay. So, you are doing Laravel in your day job but you're also doing some stuff on the side. There's various level of folks who you're working with. You're in Stack Overflow English early. You're somewhat connected but it's been a little while with the Laravel Brazil community.

One of the reasons I asked that is because my book has been translated into two or three languages and Brazilian Portuguese is one of them. I was pretty surprised by that because that takes a pretty big commitment for somebody in the community to have decided that it's a group they want to target. I was wondering if there's some huge Brazilian Laravel community that I wasn't aware of. It sounds like at least there at some point was but it, at least the one in Rio, might have gone a little quiet for a little while.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yes, I think the community to large but they are not very connected.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Antonio Ribeiro:
I think they are more connected in the PHP community than in the Laravel community.

Matt Stauffer:
Got it. That makes sense. Okay, so before I got to your life story, I want you to give me a pitch real quick on the TDDD and then if there's any other one package that it's just really your favorite package or your favorite contribution to Laravel. I don't know if Stats Tracker or something else but first, tell me about TDDD as if I'd never heard of it before. Then, do you have any other packages that you really love and that you want to share with everybody?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Well, TDDD is becoming an app actually. It's an app for helping people do TDDD. Basically, you are writing tests. If you write tests before or during or after you are coding- doesn't matter. You can use it to help you test your app during development. You make a change in your code, it will run all your tests. If you do a change in one of your tests, it will run that test particularly. It's basically that. We have some other things it does. It is able to link all the lines of your failures so you can click a link and it will open your PHPStorm, or your Sublime Text, or VSCode. It doesn't matter what editor you are using.

I just added code coverage to it so you can also see the code coverage there. It's basically that. You can add as many projects as you have. You can use whatever code editor you have. If you have a project which you have tests in JavaScript, in PHP, in any other thing, you can add as many suites you want to add on it so it's very flexible. I use it all the time. I think it's the package that I'm using the most these days.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, very cool. Is this an app where you think that if anybody's doing TDD in Laravel, they should just be using TDDD? Or is it more for specific contexts and not for others?

Antonio Ribeiro:
No, everybody can use it. If you are using TDD in Laravel or PHP or you can use it in Ruby. It's very open. I think it's a good one to use because Freek has a package almost like it but it's for the command line.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Antonio Ribeiro:
The difference for me is that I keep a monitor ... I have three monitors here. I keep a monitor with it and while I'm coding I'm looking at the monitor and seeing if anything is broken with the code that I'm writing. It's very handy.

Matt Stauffer:
That's really cool. I asked for one other package that is really big for you. I know you've been working on Version recently but I also know that Stats Tracker is one of your more popular ones. If you had one more of your packages that you think people should check out, which ones at the top of your brain?

Antonio Ribeiro:
I like, very much, Google 2FA but I think there are other options and people are using Authy which you can blend into Laravel very easily. I think Firewall is a package that people should look at.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I use Firewall.

Antonio Ribeiro:
You use Firewall?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. I had basically written a crappy version of Firewall and then you can out with Firewall so I just switched over to using your package so ... Could you give like a high-level introduction to what Firewall is?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Firewall is basically something you put in front of your app to protect it. It's like a real firewall. The difference, of course, is that you cannot rely on Firewall for everything but you can rely on it for things like someone trying to exploit your app. A Firewall will be better on that but if someone tries to hit one route 50 times, it will warn you about them and it can block the person or block the country. It's very flexible in this way too. I like it because one of these days I found someone in Denmark trying to exploit one of my end points so it's cool.

Matt Stauffer:
Nice. Some of the things that Firewall can do is it black lists and white lists, it allows you to block people really easily. It also does some detection, like you were saying. It does some intelligent detection to find people causing problems.

It's also got a couple other cool features. One of the things I liked was, you can basically send everybody on the whole site to a "Coming Soon" page except people with white-listed IP addresses. So there's a couple other tools that are in the same vein of Firewall but are not just for security purposes. Some of them are for access purposes as well. It's really, really fast. I think I remember looking at some other packages and they would add 50 to 100 milliseconds and your GitHub page says 10 milliseconds which is really basically negligible on most sites.

Alright, so I have given a little bit of the high-level introduction. Who you are and what ... People may have heard of your or they may have seen your stuff before and not have always known. We're about to jump into the history of who you are but I wanted to point one thing out which is that for the longest time, I had difficulty remembering what your name was because you have an "I" in front of it in your twitter handle. So it says "iantontio" and I would always think, "His name is Iantonio or" ... But then I would remember there's a Carlos somewhere in there and I'd be like "Is it Ian Carlos" and I always had a lot of trouble. I've always wanted to tell you the "I" has been so confusing to me.

Alright, so.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Sorry.

Matt Stauffer:
No no, you're fine. You said, when you're 12 years old you were in Switzerland? You were living there at the time and you got into computers and so you got a job delivering stuff so that you could have enough money to ... But what I'm curious about is, how did you actually get into computers in the first time? I don't want to go too far down this road but I will mention that there's a little more gray in your beard than there is my beard. Maybe I'll just say that. So at this point you were not discovering the same computers that I was discovering when I was 12 years old. What did it look like for you to learn about and get interested in computers and what were those first computers you were getting interested in at that point?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Commodore VIC-20 was the first computer I touched with my own fingers. People were talking very much about Commodore 64, I think. I wasn't able to use one but after some time I got back to Brazil. I went first to France. I was there for some time. Then I got to Switzerland, some cities in Switzerland. Then I got back to Brazil and I decided to do a course. I was 18, I think. Then I was really amazed by Apple computers and the first PCs in Brazil. I think it was that. Very early in computing, here in Brazil, I got catched by them.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah. At that point, there were actually classes that you could be taking. You weren't having to teach you on your own, right?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yes. Mostly, yes. That was my whole life because first I try a course to get classes and it was not very good because I was already reading a lot about computers and about programming. Then I got to try class of a friend of my father which basically gave me a book and a computer and told me to learn by myself. I was basically self-taught my whole life.

Matt Stauffer:
Was that Commodore 64 that you were working with at that point then?

Antonio Ribeiro:
No, at that point it was an Apple 2.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh okay. So I assume you were learning how to use the machine but were you learning coding, like AppleScript at that point? Or what were you learning at that point?

Antonio Ribeiro:
First, it was basic and then I got to dBase. You know dBase?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yeah, so those were the languages that I started to learn. Then after doing this course I went to a company to work for them but work and learn. It was more like a friend than a boss. There we started to work with C. Not C++ yet. This was before. We were building a translation system in Clipper and C.

Matt Stauffer:
Translation meaning translating languages.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Exactly. It was trying to translate from six different languages but it was like changing words, not really-

Matt Stauffer:
It didn't understand syntax. It just replaced one word with another?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yeah, basically that. After, we started to translate to switch sentences and idioms and things like that.

Matt Stauffer:
You understood how to do the parsing well enough to write all that? Were you actively involved in writing those translation layers?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yeah, it was not exactly a parsing. It was like, try to get the meaning in the sentence and just switch words.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Really rudimentary I think.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I'm trying to get all the age ranges here. You said when you got to Brazil you were taking courses so was that university when you got back home?

Antonio Ribeiro:
No. It was during high school.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh, okay. Was this job doing the translation layer, were you also still in school at that point? Or was that out of school?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yes, yes. I was working then and studying at the same time. Always.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, so what was your degree that you were seeking?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Some years after I got to do university here. I have a degree in computing.

Matt Stauffer:
Got it, yeah. It sounds like computers have been a thing for a very long time. The first thing you mentioned about when you were younger is getting into computers when you were 12 years old. I know that you're interested in photography and I feel like you've mentioned dancing at one point so I know you have some other things. Are those going as far back as computers, as well? Or have you sort of always been ... Computers is one of your biggest hobbies since the early days?

Antonio Ribeiro:
No. Both dancing and photography are things that I started five years ago, eight years ago. Eight years ago photography and five years ago dancing. At that point my wife had the dance classes. We are seven years together so seven years of dancing and eight years of photography.

Matt Stauffer:
That's amazing. What sort of dancing was it?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Samba. Do you know samba?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah. I can't do it but I know what it is. [laughter]

Antonio Ribeiro:
Samba, rock-and-roll. We call it differently here but it's like rock-and-roll. And salsa.

Matt Stauffer:
My wife is a dancer and I'm one of the worst dancers of all time. She's like a professional dancer and I'm a klumbling, bumbling idiot so it's a very fun pair. I know the words even if I don't know how to do anything. So five to ten years of photography, five to ten years of dancing, but this computer thing goes the whole way back there. Was it weird that you were 12 and you were into computing and it wasn't as much of a cultural phenomenon ... I mean, a 12 year old kid that's into computers today is just no big deal. Being a 12 year old in the 90's, for me, was a little bit weird. I get the sense that you were in the 12 year old more in the late 80's or something like that. Was it culturally strange in Switzerland, where you were, or was this a normative thing? Was it normal in Brazil? Was it weird in Brazil? What, culturally, was it like being that into computers that young?

Antonio Ribeiro:
I think it was completely different for people to know that I was excited about something nobody knew at the time. It was very, very expensive. In Brazil, a computer- it was like buying a car or two. My mother didn't want me to go to that path because she didn't believe very much in the power of a computer. I had to be an engineer or something like that.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.

Antonio Ribeiro:
So I asked her to buy me a computer and she basically said no, of course not.

Matt Stauffer:
Of course not. What are you talking about?

What was it that interested you so much about computers when you were 12? What was the thing that you saw or the possibilities that you saw or did you see a specific thing happen and you say, "I want to be able to do that"? What was it

Antonio Ribeiro:
I think it was exactly that. Infinite possibilities.

Matt Stauffer:
And you were able to figure that out? That early?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yeah, I think so. For a lot of time, in that department store, I was just trying to figure out what the thing was about. I was able to play with it and to write things and to create small programs. It was really cool.

Matt Stauffer:
I learned basic but you said, this was the Commodore 64, or VIC-something, or I don't know. What were you writing at that point?

Antonio Ribeiro:
VIC-20.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, 20. What were you writing in at that point, when you were really getting started?

Antonio Ribeiro:
I don't remember. I was just copying stuff from magazines and then changing words and changing functions.

Matt Stauffer:
And seeing if you could control things, yeah.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Very cool. When you were back in Brazil, you started studying things. You got the job translating. It seems like you were always had multiple fingers in multiple pies, as the expression goes. What was your goal then? Did you have a goal other than just to do more stuff with computers?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Learning was always my goal. Even today. What happened there ... Actually I was working for another company in Brazil before going to that job. There I learned to write a little bit more of Clipper and when I go to the company of the translation, I decided I was able to do the translation system in a different way. What we had at the time, it was a software that was plugged into a editor like Microsoft Word. It was not that, it was another editor. It was able to get the words from the editor and write words in another language. So I decided to build an editor which was able to translate at the same time.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh my gosh. Like a Word Perfect type thing.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yeah, exactly. Before Word Perfect.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh god. That's no big project or anything like that. No big deal. [laughter] Okay so how'd that work for you?

Antonio Ribeiro:
I was young and I had no idea- [laughter]

Matt Stauffer:
That's fantastic. How long did that dream last?

Antonio Ribeiro:
That dream come true.

Matt Stauffer:
You actually built one?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yeah! It was released and it was sold to a lot of people.

Matt Stauffer:
It was you working alone?

Antonio Ribeiro:
For some time, yeah. Until I got everything almost done, it was me in secret. Then it became a project from the company.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh okay. So the company that you were working for sort of absorbed it and then they released it but it was your work originally.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yeah but for the company. I was working there.

Matt Stauffer:
Sure. What I'm hearing you say is-

Antonio Ribeiro:
Nobody knew exactly what I was doing but I was working there.

Matt Stauffer:
What I'm hearing you say is that at a relatively young age, you built a word processor from scratch that was live-translating from one language to another that was released and purchased by many, many, many people.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yes.

Matt Stauffer:
No big deal. No big deal. You just do it in your sleep, ya know? [laughter]

We've talked about your work there. You released that thing. What was next after that? I assumed you worked there for a little while. You said you started there when you were in school so what was the next big move whether being done with school or being with that company or geographic move- what was the next thing that went from there?

Antonio Ribeiro:
No big moves. I went from one job to another because I was always seeking something new to do, something new to learn. When I was 21, my girlfriend got pregnant so I got married. Things got a little bit different because I was not working for learning anymore. I was working for money.

Matt Stauffer:
For providing, yeah.

Antonio Ribeiro:
To provide. I went to university when my daughter was already born. Then I went and worked for another company of a big friend. Then I stayed there for five or six years and then around 1998 I decided to move completely to a completely different life and built a webhost company. There I working for a company. I was trying to get into the public serving. I was doing a concourse, I don't know how to say that in English but you have to do a test to enter to public serving.

Matt Stauffer:
Like a certification?

Antonio Ribeiro:
No, it's like ... I don't know exactly how to say that in English.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Antonio Ribeiro:
It's a concourse. You have a lot of people competing for a position in the company.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh, it's almost like a competition and you have to get a better score on an exam, or something like that?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yeah, that's it exactly. Exactly like that. I don't know if you have that in US.

Matt Stauffer:
I'm sure that concept exists where multiple people are competing for the same promotion. I don't know if it's such a normative thing where we have a word for it though. That makes sense though, what you're saying.

Antonio Ribeiro:
I got a position; we built the company, me and Anselmo, my partner. The company was doing a lot of things and we were also working for another company rebuilding their system. They have the system written in Pascal. You know Pascal?

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I don't know it but I know what it is.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Actually, TurboPascal at the time and we decided to move everything to Delphi.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Me and him, basically, he wrote a 20 year old software into Delphi.

Matt Stauffer:
Wow.

Antonio Ribeiro:
That was our greatest move at the time, I think. The company had a lot of clients and nobody knew exactly how to build things for Windows, at the time. Everybody was still working on DOS. The company had five or six different big softwares including a healthcare system using Pascal and everything running DOS. We had to move to Windows because DOS was dying at the time. I think it was almost dead.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Antonio Ribeiro:
That was a really big move. For that move, why we decided to go in this path was because they offered us part of the company.

Matt Stauffer:
For rewriting all those systems?

Antonio Ribeiro:
So we had 20% of the company and 13 years ago this move and everything switched and the software was working, they basically cut us off the contact.

Matt Stauffer:
But you had 20% of the company at that point, right?

Antonio Ribeiro:
No, not anymore. We lost everything.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh my gosh.

Antonio Ribeiro:
That was 2013. It was exactly when I decided go web. We were not web anymore. Actually, the whole problem was we were talking to them that we needed to go to the web. Move everything to the web as fast as we could because everybody else was already there.

Matt Stauffer:
Right.

Antonio Ribeiro:
So, they say to us, "No, we cannot do that now" and just cut us off. End of story.

Matt Stauffer:
I don't wanna go too deep into money issues but if you own 20%, did they just force you to sell your shares? I don't know how that worked legally. Or was it more of an agreement where that was a little more casual.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yeah, that was the problem actually. We had no contract. We had no shares. We had nothing. It was basically friends doing something really big together for 10 years or 13 years. They just stopped giving us money and end of story.

Matt Stauffer:
I don't mean to at all preach in the face of something difficult that you're going through but my business partner, Dan, and I have found that since the beginning of us starting the company together we said, "you know what, we have each been burned in this similar way at some point in our lives. Where we go into business with friends and just hugely regret it later". Because you're working with friends you don't do the same level of protection that you might've normally done otherwise and so what we decided to do as we started our company was to be very legalistic. Even more than you might be with someone that you don't know so that at no point do we get to a point where our friendship is on the rocks because of those tensions. Because everything's explicitly spelled out. But obviously we had that after having been burned multiple times just like you were on that one. So I know how that feels although I don't think to the level that you experienced so I'm sorry. That's not fun.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
How did you guys recover from that? That's a hard hit. What did you do next?

Antonio Ribeiro:
I was lucky because I had two different jobs. The job I still have now, working for government, I had it because it will basically give me money for the rest of my life.

Matt Stauffer:
Right.

Antonio Ribeiro:
So I lost 50% of what I was making at the time but that's not really bad.

Matt Stauffer:
It's not the end of the world.

Antonio Ribeiro:
I had to move from the apartment I was in. A lot of things happened in my life but I survived. And him too. So it's okay.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. I like the attitude. The hosting provider, is that still going on? Because you've mentioned working for the government. You've mentioned working for the translation people. Then you switched jobs to other people. You're mentioned these folks who you had the 20% with but you don't anymore. You mentioned the hosting provider that you created. I'm not always fully following who you work for at any given moment so you're definitely still working for the government because you just told me that. Are you still doing this hosting thing?

Antonio Ribeiro:
No, not anymore.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh okay.

Antonio Ribeiro:
We had to close everything because-

Matt Stauffer:
Oh I'm sorry.

Antonio Ribeiro:
The money that we were making with the other company was providing a lot of things, including the hosting company that was not very profitable at the time.

Matt Stauffer:
Got it.

Antonio Ribeiro:
So we closed it. Very fast.

Matt Stauffer:
When you said hosting company, the first that came to my mind was your were running some servers and you were renting out shared hosting but you've never actually said that. What sort of hosting were you renting and what sort of folks were your clients?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Exactly that. The hosting company started because we knew a little bit about internet. We saw some hosting companies doing really bad things in the market and we decided to get one client of ours, which was not exactly that company that was our partner, and build a site for them. For that we needed a good webserver so we learn a lot of Linux at the time, Debian Linux, build a server, got a home internet connection, discovered how to make things happen to get a DNS up, Apache mail server ... So we learn everything in three months and we got it up.

Matt Stauffer:
Geez.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Got it all up and the company was online, working-

Matt Stauffer:
You said home internet server. You were able to get a fixed IP address though, right?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yes. Afterwards, yeah. We started with an IP address. Actually, our tests were all doing at home. Then we got an IP address in an office of a friend in downtown so it was that. After that, we moved our server collocation inside the center and got more servers and the thing got really big.

Matt Stauffer:
Right. Was it just the two of you remoting into those servers in the collocation center or did you start having other folks working for you as well?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Not in the webservers company. It was only me and him.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. What do you use for hosting now for your side projects? Are you a Linode guy or are you hosting your own stuff?

Matt Stauffer:
I do the same thing. I know my way around a basic Linode server or an Nginx and Apache and stuff like that but I'm not to the point where I could be running my own hosting service. It's interesting to hear someone who has such a depth of experience in hosting still choosing. Saying, "Hey this is the easiest way to do it so why not".

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
So that was 2013. Those things shut down. Since 2013, obviously you've mentioned that the last time the Laravel meet-up was going was in 2016 and you said at that point you had already kind of stepped away a little bit. What have the last four years been like? What have you been working on? Obviously you're still spitting our packages and I'm guessing you're still answering questions on Stack Overflow, although I have not looking at how recent your most recent was. What else are you up to? What are you most interested in? What have you been learning and excited about learning recently?

Antonio Ribeiro:
I'm learning JavaScript now.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, got it.

Antonio Ribeiro:
I got into VueJS very early but I did not move my thinks to VueJS. Right now everything I do is Laravel, back end API, VueJS front end.

Matt Stauffer:
Got it.

Antonio Ribeiro:
The past four years, I was basically learning, doing some jobs and some websites for one or another people or company. Doing some contracting work. Everything is small. Two years ago we started to build things in the government using Laravel so it got really big. I have at least five sites and two mobile apps using Laravel. One of the sites, we have a voting system for young congressmen in Rio de Janeiro.

Matt Stauffer:
Cool.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yeah. My company, it has a program for young congressmen so every year we have all the schools in the state, the students, trying to become young congressmen. We have a big voting, I think in July, and then they go to be a congressman for a week. Creating bills and voting bills in and afterwards those bills usually become a real state bill.

Matt Stauffer:
So, you built that. I assume you're using View Router and Laravel is really just basically spitting out the view initialization and then the API but none of the front end of those applications is actually built by Laravel? Or is it more of a mix?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Oh, no. The APIs, Laravel, the front end, is usually view. Particularly this one is not 100% view yet because it has one year and a half. But it basically VueJS.

Matt Stauffer:
Stepping outside of coding a little bit, I am going to admit that I am an extraordinarily, commonly ignorant American when it comes to most things Brazil, Portuguese, and even Rio. I've seen a couple movies. I watched City of God a whole bunch of times. My sister lived in Rio for a year and my book was translated-

Antonio Ribeiro:
Oh yeah?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, she's obsessed with Portuguese. When I went home for Thanksgiving a couple of weeks ago, she had been at the bank after coming back from a year living in Brazil and she heard two people speaking Brazilian Portuguese. She walked up, she said "Excuse me, are you from Brazil?" And they look at her like she's a crazy person. They say "Yes, we just moved here and we're setting up our first bank account". She said, "Let's be friends!" And so they and one of her other random Brazilian friends were over at my family's house for Thanksgiving and my son does capoeira so he was like doing the capoeira plays back and forth with one of the guys who does capoeira.

I have this very tiny, tiny, tiny side influence that is bringing more than average amount of Brazil into my life but I really know very, very little about the city. I know very little about the country. I know very little about the language. So as a total American idiot who doesn't know anything, let's start with Rio. What aspect of Rio do you feel like, if someone were to visit, they just needed to take in? Obviously, there's a couple specific tourist sites but what aspect of living there and being there do you think is really interest and unique relative to other similar countries that you would really want people to know about?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yeah, I think if you are coming to Brazil you have to come blend. The people are the best. We are, I'll not say "cool", but we are good. We are warming. We love to chat, to be with people, to laugh. Knowing the city is something that will happen really fast if you know people here because, of course, you can go to tourist sites. It's easy to get a book and go to tourist sites but to eat food, if you like food, to eat good food. To know amazing restaurants and not very known restaurants. You have to know people. You have to make friends here. And its very easy to make friends in Brazil. Really, really easy.

Matt Stauffer:
I like that. Talking about food, if there was one food that you would want everyone to try, what would it be?

Antonio Ribeiro:
My American boss was in Brazil last week. I got them to eat a lamb. There is a very good lamb here in Lapa. I don't know if you know the name.

Matt Stauffer:
No.

Antonio Ribeiro:
It's a very popular part of the city where you can find a lot of bars opening at night. Friday and Saturday you go there and you will probably see like 200 persons. 200,000 persons in that part of the city. It's really very crowded. So the lamb.

Matt Stauffer:
So, if I were go to and I were to visit, I would need to get lamb. I would make friends with people. Get to know ... And honestly that's one of the most commonly known things about Brazil. It's just wonderful. A lot of the stereotypes also have to do with parties and fun and entertainment and Carnival and all that kind of stuff. Are there any stereotypes or any common misconceptions you think that people have about Brazil and Brazilians that you think aren't true that you want to dispel?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Probably, people think that Rio in particular is too dangerous to know. Of course, it's dangerous. We are living in dangerous times. But it's not like that. You can come here and you will be safe. It's not like something bad will happen as you as you touch the soil.

Matt Stauffer:
Walk out the door, right.

Antonio Ribeiro:
It's safe here. It's a good place to be.

Matt Stauffer:
Cool, I like that. We're a little short on time but I want to make sure that we touch into the other things that you're really passionate about. We've got dancing and photography cued up. I do want to ask before I go into those two, am I missing anything about you? Is there an aspect of who you are or what you've done, a part of your story or anything, that I've just completely missed that you really want to make sure people get the chance to hear?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Not at the top of my mind, I don't think so.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, so let's talk photography.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Probably yes, but nothing I can remember.

Matt Stauffer:
Alright, let's talk photography. What got you into photography? What sort of things do you primarily focus on photographing? How much is it actually a part of your life right now? I know it has been as some point, is it still?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yeah, I got into photography because I love to make photos. I'm very technical with everything I do so I like very much to program my camera.

Matt Stauffer:
Are you a manual-mode kind of guy?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yes, yes. I do all the time. I love to take pictures of people. This may be what I do the best.

Matt Stauffer:
Uh-huh.

Antonio Ribeiro:
I got known in the photography world by taking pictures of shows and nature.

Matt Stauffer:
Like music shows?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Music shows, yeah. Because of the dancing, which is the other, I got to the music of the city. To know a lot of musicians, to be with musicians. I have at least two great friends in music here in Rio. I got to photograph them. Today I think their photos in Facebook and Twitter are my photos.

Matt Stauffer:
When you go straight to your website, you see photography right in there. Is the background of your website, is that a photo you took?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yes. Everything, yes.

Matt Stauffer:
That's gorgeous. It doesn't look real. I assumed, even though I knew you did photography, I assumed you must not have taken them because they're so beautiful. I'm really impressed with this.

Antonio Ribeiro:
All of them. You're talking about which one?

Matt Stauffer:
Well, the first ones that came up the last few times I went were a couple of the view of Rio from above. Then, obviously, I'm sure you're aware it keeps cycling through photos. These are incredible photos. Do you consider yourself a professional photographer?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yes but I don't make money from photography. I have some professional work, three or four, but I'm not really into it. I'm not photography too much these days. Photography takes a lot of time. You have to really stop and look at the photo. Retouch sometimes. That takes a lot of time too. It's time consuming so I don't have that time now.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. It's mildly offensive that you can say that you don't even have time for photography and you don't do much and then your photos are this good. I'm just going to tell you that right now.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yes. I agree.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, this is really beautiful stuff. Folks who are listening, definitely check it out. Of course this will all be in the show notes. Okay so, do you and your wife still dance a lot?

Antonio Ribeiro:
We dance a little bit. Not as much as we would like to dance and we are not in the dance classes anymore. We were in the beginning of the year. We went back to the dance classes but our lives are getting too crazy to be there, to go to class every week at such time. It's hard. It's hard for us.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, absolutely. Especially when you have a family. There's just a lot of obligations that come from family and come from work and everything like that. I'm finding that I haven't picked up a lot of my hobbies. Somebody asked in the Laravel advent "What are your hobbies" and I laughed and I said, "Keeping my kids alive". There's just times when, if everybody's alive and fed at the end of the time and the house hasn't burned down, I'm considering it a win.

Cool. Well, we're coming up on time. I know I said is there any high-level aspects of your story that we haven't covered but are there any projects or any frameworks or any packages or any conferences or meet ups that you'd like to plug, you want to talk about, or you want to make sure people know about?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yeah, because it's getting old. Codes is really ugly to look at right now. I think I have changed as a coder in the past years.

Matt Stauffer:
It's a couple years old, right?

Antonio Ribeiro:
Yeah, yeah. It's like two or three years old. I think it was the first big package that I wrote and people really like it. I think I have to give some love to the package again.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah. It's this thing where we look at our old code and we can't imagine how we ever wrote like that but it's still our baby. I like it.

It's hard every time. It's hard to cut off talking when I have so many more questions but I feel like we've covered a really good chunk. We made it from at least age 14 until today, even if we probably missed a lot of interesting digressions we could have taken. Thank you so much for your time. It was a ton of fun talking to you. I love getting to learn about you. Thank you for the contribution you make, especially because often you're making those contributions ... Again, I don't want to say nobody knows who you are or anything like that but you're consistently helping. Getting a good Stack Overflow score means that you have helped a huge number of people. You've helped me many, many, many times. So, for the tireless work that you do helping people in our community- thank you very, very, very much.

Antonio Ribeiro:
Thanks for having me and thanks for inviting me do this interview. And thanks for your blogging too because your blog posts are helping me all the time as well.

Matt Stauffer:
I love it. Well, I promise that I'm gonna do my best to actually writing them again. I'm in the same pit as you where anything other than the day job and keeping my family alive have really dropped. But my hope for 2018, let's get back into doing these side things and working on our packages and our blogs.

Antonio, thank you so much for your time. Everybody else, see everything you need in the show notes. Just go to laravelpodcast.com and we'll see you next time. [music]

Matt Stauffer: Welcome back to the Laravel Podcast. Today I'm interviewing Jeffrey Way, the creator of Laracasts, and one of the original ... Wait, the original? One of the OGs of Laravel. Stay tuned.

All right. Welcome back to the Laravel Podcast. This is season three, and like I said, I'm not giving you crazy people episode numbers, because I'm bad at counting, so this is the latest, whatever it is, episode of the Laravel Podcast season three, and I've actually got one of our long-term recurring guests with me. I've got Jeffrey Way, the man, the legend, the creator of Laracasts, and one of the significant popularizers of Laravel. Man, half of y'all, more than half of y'all, when you learned Laravel, you were learning it from this guy. But what I like about this season is that you might know about what he's taught you. A lot of people say, "You know what? I listen to him every single day. I feel like I basically have a relationship with him at this point." But you might not know a lot about where he came from, so I'm really excited about the opportunity to sit down with Jeffrey for a little bit and kind of ask some questions about who he is, and where he came from.

Jeffrey, I have some things I already have queued up, but I'm also excited to see kind of what's going to come up as we go. First thing, top of the line, say hi to the people, and when you introduce yourself to someone new, not in our context, what do you tell people you do? I just want to hear your pitch.

Jeffrey Way: My name is Jeffrey. I'm a web developer. I've been doing it for about 15 years at this point. I run a business call Laracasts, which hopefully listeners of this podcast know. If not, it's dedicated to education mostly in Laravel, but really just the Laravel developers. It covers a lot of the ecosystem that we use, like Vue, and Webpack, and HTML, and CSS. It's kind of for that type of developer. Lots of sites cover everything. They cover Ruby, and Python, and PHP, and Node, and it ends up getting a little overwhelming, because most people do have a focus.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Jeffrey Way: That's why I created Laracasts.

Matt Stauffer: Well, the interesting thing is, in some ways it's very focused, right? It's the video tutorial site for the Laravel world. But on the other hand, it's everything the Laravel developer needs, and so it's not just PHP. It's not just Laravel, right? You're covering front-end. You're covering back-end. You're covering process. It's got Git, and it's got PhpStorm. That's what I love about it, is that you say it's not just Laravel, but it is for the Laravel developer. Everything that person needs. I love that. I love that you gave yourself the freedom to say, "You know what? Whatever. As a Laravel developer, I write CSS. Then therefore Laracasts can cover CSS."

Jeffrey Way: Yeah, because really, as you know, Laravel ends up being a big piece of the puzzle, but really most of your time you're trying to solve other problems, or you're trying to figure out, "I screwed up this Git commit. How do I fix that?" Laravel is one piece of the puzzle, but there's countless pieces that we have to deal with every single day. It tries to cover all of that.

Matt Stauffer: I remember your talk a few years ago, I think it was at Laracon, where you went on that whole kind of prepared rant about all the things that you have to know to be a web developer today. I'll make sure to link that in the show notes.

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. You know, that ended up being the most popular presentation I've ever given.

Matt Stauffer: I believe it.

Jeffrey Way: On YouTube, it has 100,000 views or something. It's crazy.

Matt Stauffer: That's awesome.

Jeffrey Way: I've never had a presentation that popular.

Matt Stauffer: Now that you heard that, you probably know that if you are listening to this podcast, and by some crazy, crazy, crazy reason you've never heard of Jeffrey, you've never heard of Laracasts, everyone else is already kind of giving credit to this, but I want to put my voice behind it. I have said for years, since long before I knew Jeffrey, before Laravel even existed, Jeffrey Way is one of the best teachers on the entire internet. Period.

Jeffrey Way: Thank you, Matt.

Matt Stauffer: If you are not subscribed to Laracasts right now, go to Laracasts.com and subscribe. I promise you you'll thank me for it. When you said that thing about what we have to learn, I'm actually onboarding a new developer to Titan as of this week, and she just graduated with her computer science degree, but she's been learning Laravel and kind of doing this stuff on the side, and so I did one of our first pairing sessions where I know what her level of Laravel knowledge is, but this morning I was like, or last night I was like, "Oh, yeah. I guess you need to learn responsive web design, and you need to learn what media queries are, and what rems and ems are." I thought about all the Laravel stuff she needed to learn, and not all this other stuff. I was like, "Okay, yeah. All these things all together."

Jeffrey Way: It's crazy when you think about how much we have to learn. We all just agree to it, too. Like, why are we agreeing to this? It's so difficult. I look back and it's like, for 10 or 15 years now, every day I'm probably learning something new. That's why we have that joke that we all spend our days on Stack Overflow.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Jeffrey Way: It's like, every day you're presented with something where you're like, "I don't know how to do this." You know?

Matt Stauffer: Yup.

Jeffrey Way: It's a little overwhelming, but that's how it goes.

Matt Stauffer: Well, a lot of us, honestly, the first time ... I'll tell a little story about this in a second, but a lot of us the first thing we do when we have a problem is not go to Stack Overflow, but we go to Laracasts and see if you've covered it. It's funny, because in our Telegram chat, sometimes somebody will be like, "You know what? I need to learn this thing. Jeffrey, please go make a video about that so I don't have to learn it on my own."

We're starting to get into code, and I promise you that that was not what this is going to be about. We are going to talk about Jeffrey. Here's what I know about your story, and I hope that this is going to give us an opportunity to figure out where to dig in. I know that your parents were composers and songwriters in Nashville, or in the music industry in general. I know that before you were full-time in programming, that you did ... I'm guessing classical guitar, but I know it's basically professional guitar playing. I know at some point you transitioned to web. I know that you did some web development teaching. You ended up at NetTuts, and eventually you split off and created Laracasts. That's the high-level knowledge. There's so many spaces to fill in.

First of all, let's start out with growing up. My guess is that you grew up in a music family, and you were just into music at an early age, but is that actually true?

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty true.

Matt Stauffer: Was it mainly guitar?

Jeffrey Way: Well, I started playing guitar when I was about seven.

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

Jeffrey Way: My parents divorced when I was five, but my mom was-

Matt Stauffer: I'm sorry.

Jeffrey Way: It's okay. My mom was a professional songwriter in Nashville. My earliest years, I spent in music studios. I remember sometimes we'd be in the studio until midnight, and I'd be passing out on some couch while they were just at this huge recording setup.

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

Jeffrey Way: It was very fun in hindsight, but at the time, you're a little kid. You don't think it's very cool.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Jeffrey Way: When in fact, it's actually incredibly cool, because this is where some of the most famous songs ever have been recorded, but yeah. That's how I grew up, so of course I got into guitar at a very young age. Both of my brothers played, so you just kind of follow in your siblings' footsteps, and that's what I did for a very, very long time. I got hooked. I don't know what it is, but for kids, you never know what it's going to be, but there's one thing that hooks them. Everything else, they brush off. You'll find one or two things that they just latch on to. Guitar was that for me. I loved guitar and finding patterns. I thought that was the coolest thing with guitar. It's not like that with other instruments, but with guitar, there are patterns. There are shapes that you can play on the guitar, and you know, "Okay, if I memorize this shape, if I move it up here I can play that same shape in an entirely different key." I always thought that was very cool.

That's what I did all the way through middle school and high school, and college. I had a music scholarship.

Matt Stauffer: I mean, you were playing at seven years old. I didn't even touch a guitar until I was in high school, and I never got very good. Was it very casual at seven, and it never got really significant until college? Were you the type where people are looking at you at 12 years old, being like, "What? Is that 12-year-old playing that right now?"

Jeffrey Way: I would sound like a jerk if I said yes. No. I mean, naturally it starts off kind of slow. I'd learned how to play a few blues progressions and things like that, and then the older I got, the more serious I got about it.

Matt Stauffer: Sure.

Jeffrey Way: By the time I got to college, it was four hours a day in practice rooms and doing that.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. I don't know. It just hooked me, and then at some point after college, it left. I don't know what it is. I always worry about that with coding, is just the obsession that I felt for guitar just left. Completely left. I have a guitar right here I'm looking at, but I just don't even play it that much. It makes me sad, honestly, but that's just how it is.

Matt Stauffer: I'm sorry to be fascinated by your sorrow, but I'm fascinated by this whole progression, but I want to go back just a second. When you were talking about being in the studio with your mom while she was writing, I'm picturing- and I've watched way too many movies- but I'm picturing this mom working hard to put bread on the table, and she's working late nights, and the kid's in the background doing his homework while he's kind of laid out on some couch in some studio. Am I getting the right vibe there, or am I romanticizing it?

Jeffrey Way: Pretty much. Yeah, no. You can think of a dark room with a huge recording setup, and yeah. Them playing the same track over and over. They play the track for five seconds. "Whoops, made a mistake. Rewind it. Play it again." As they go through each layer, and the singer goes-

Matt Stauffer: She was a songwriter, but she was in the studio with the people who were actually recording it?

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. Yeah. She would do demos. For songwriters, they write a song, and then they'll go in the studio and do a demo.

Matt Stauffer: Oh, okay.

Jeffrey Way: At least this is how it works in Nashville. Then that demo will be shopped around to all of the labels for ... She was in Nashville, so it would be shopped around to people like Shania Twain, or Faith Hill, or those types of people.

Matt Stauffer: Would she sing the demo?

Jeffrey Way: No. No, no. We'd get professionals to do it. Then I started playing guitar, and I wanted to be the one playing. Of course, I wasn't even remotely good enough, and my mom let me know that, which hurt my feelings significantly, but she was of course completely right. In my head, I thought I should be the one in there playing guitar in this demo, with two years experience, which is ridiculous.

Matt Stauffer: Right. Was your goal to be a studio musician, or performance, or just whatever came?

Jeffrey Way: Of course I wanted to be like a rock star as a kid, but then as I started getting older, I started figuring out my personality, and I started realizing, "I'm probably not the personality type to go on tour and stuff like that." But I did like the idea of being a studio musician, where it's like you have your day job, and you go in, and you do your work, and then you go home and you can be with your family. Because I always thought, even when I started dating my wife in college, and even then I was still focused on guitar a lot, and I was thinking to myself, "Do I want to go on tour and then just not be with her for four months out of the year?" That ends up what happens if you're a touring musician. You leave for months at a time. You come back for a week, and then you're back on the road. Even then, I was thinking, "I don't want to be away from my girlfriend or my wife for long periods of time."

That's when I switched to being a studio musician, but I don't know. Whatever it was completely left, that obsession. I think about it a lot, actually.

Matt Stauffer: It's not just the obsession that left, because it seems like even the simple joy that comes from playing. Because it wouldn't hurt you. You run your own business. You could take an hour and just go play right now, and the whole thing wouldn't come crumbling down, but that's not even the first thing you would do right now. It seems, and maybe I'm reading it wrong. It's not just the obsession that's gone. Is it even the joy from playing?

Jeffrey Way: Yeah, kind of. I always think the things you love will come back, so I have this feeling when I'm older it will come back, but I don't know if it was because I was doing it from such a young age so seriously, for so long that I burned out?

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. That's what I was wondering.

Jeffrey Way: I feel like it's the guitar version of burnout. Like, I completely burned out on it, and it just wasn't fun anymore.

Matt Stauffer: I assume this was just a couple of years out of college, so it was probably you had gone from it being the thing that you pursued on your own to all of a sudden a more structured thing? Or is that not a true characteristic?

Jeffrey Way: It was right in college when I kind of stopped. Maybe it was this. I was in college on a music scholarship, and in college, for whatever reason, it was like, "You don't go to college to be a rock star."

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Jeffrey Way: They're going to have you either playing jazz music or playing classical guitar. There, it's like, what's required of you is you go into a study room and you practice four hours a day to get the notes exactly right. Even at the time, I remember thinking, "This isn't why I got into guitar." I didn't get into guitar to play this piece from the 1500s perfectly in front of a bunch of people while I'm wearing a suit. That's not why I got into it. I think that somewhat ruined it for me.

Matt Stauffer: That's what I was wondering, whether it's the process of taking the thing that you loved, which is playing guitar on the songs you love, in the way you want, when it's your motivation to do it, and turning it into playing somebody else's music with pressure, in contexts that you normally wouldn't choose, with the structure and the pressure around it. It's like some people say, "I loved coding when it was my side thing, but once it became my full-time job, it kind of sucked the joy out of it."

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. You hear about that a lot, in tons of industries, where it's like if you take your passion and then suddenly it's your job, it goes away. I've heard about that with photographers, where it's like they love photography, but then suddenly they do it every day for a living, and they grow to hate it. I worry about this with coding a lot, honestly. Like, "Will I get to the point where I hate it and I dread it every day?" Do you think about that at all?

Matt Stauffer: All the time. I think about it all the time because it's the same thing. I've had that happen before, and I can't believe I can't think of it right now, but I know that at least in some ways when I was doing some art, I had a little bit of the same experience. It was fun, and it was creative, and when it became work and there's pressure to perform a creative act in a certain ... You know, it was very difficult.

Jeffrey Way: Right.

Matt Stauffer: But for some reason, with programming, I often tell people, at least for now, I've been back into professional programming for seven years I think at this point. I don't see any signs of it. I'm worried about it just like you are, but for me, every new day there's 100 things I could be doing that are fascinating to me. I think maybe we joke about the fact that there's so much pressure on us to learn all these things, but maybe the fact that there's so much new, there's so much open, and there's even within that, there's so much choice for us about what we want to pursue, that even though we have to sit down and perform, if our jobs are healthy ... I mean, your job is. You get to pick what you're doing. My job is. I give everybody 20% time. We have that breathing room to go and explore and be fascinated, maybe, like we were before it was a profession. That gives us a little bit of that breathing room.

Jeffrey Way: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I think about it sometimes with school, you know? When you force kids to learn, are you ruining it for them?

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Jeffrey Way: That's that common discussion that goes back and forth. It's got to be this hard line to walk, where it's like you need to encourage kids to learn these specific things, but if you push too hard, you're going to ruin it, because you're going to ruin it for them. I think about that a lot now that I have a daughter. I'm not sure how we're going to do that. I guess you have to present them with lots of choices, lots of things, and then wait to see what they really latch on to.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, and really good teachers help make things fascinating. I think the best kind of teacher, whether it's in school, or even I'm trying to remember what it was, but I was listening to somebody talk about being a good podcast host. The best way to make something interesting is to be curious, and to invite kids along with this curiosity, to invite their learners along, where you are helping basically infect them with the desire to know more, and the fascination. Instead of forcing you to learn this, you're developing within you a curiosity and a fascination, and once you think about it that way, a lot of the best teachers use that language, but I don't know if that language would have clicked before we started thinking this way.

It's the same thing for me. Once I had kids, I totally thought about learning and school a very different way.

Jeffrey Way: No, I agree. It's contagious, too. Who I think does this better than anyone is Neil Degrasse Tyson. You don't even have to be interested in astrophysics.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: But if you listen to him talk, just go on YouTube and find any presentation he gives, he's so passionate and so enthusiastic about it that he'll be talking about something so mundane, and he will make it sound incredibly interesting. Sometimes I'll just go on YouTube and watch video after video of his, because it's contagious.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: Really interesting stuff.

Matt Stauffer: It's interesting, because it's a two-way thing. I think individual people can be so fascinated in maybe a relatively uninteresting thing that their fascination can be contagious, but I also think that we can develop within us a curiosity and hopefully develop within other people a curiosity that makes otherwise boring things more interesting. I often have conversations, I'll meet somebody at a dinner party or something like that, and my wife will make fun of me because I'll meet this new person I've never met before who doesn't seem that interesting, but they are very interested in something, and they might not have the Neil Degrasse Tyson in them to make it sound interesting, but I can spend an hour with them and be fascinated by ...

I remember meeting this guy who at first was just very neckbeardy, judgey, makes everybody else feel dumb. But I was like, "There's something this guy is brilliant about. He's a PhD, blah blah blah." I discovered that he cares about certain phase quasars, blah blah blah blah blah, and ended up learning about those things for hours. I don't care about those things, but for those couple hours, I was fascinated by it. I think it's an intentional curiosity that we can try to develop in ourselves that helps us. I don't know. That's my hope for my kid, is that they become curious, you know?

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. No. That's great. That's great.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. Studied music, went off to school. I assume that you were majoring in guitar performance? Was that what they called it?

Jeffrey Way: Music theory was-

Matt Stauffer: Music. Oh, so you weren't even in performance, so the theory, was that part of the load?

Jeffrey Way: I'm actually trying to remember. It was like performance ... One was a major. One was a minor.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. Got it. A little bit of both.

Jeffrey Way: I can't even remember, but yeah. I was doing both every single day.

Matt Stauffer: You lost the passion in the middle of college. Did you graduate with that degree, or did you switch to a different degree program?

Jeffrey Way: I didn't even finish college.

Matt Stauffer: Oh, yeah.

Jeffrey Way: I dropped out. Yeah. In the middle of all of this, I started losing interest, and then I started focusing on code a little bit. It was funny, I remember talking to my mom about it, and she was very upset about this, because of course she was a musician and a writer, so she thought her kids was going to follow in her footsteps. Then suddenly, I'm leaning towards programming. I was trying to explain to her, "No, there's a huge amount of creativity in this." But to her, it's just like, "Code. Code. Code."

Matt Stauffer: Right. Right. Right. Soulless.

Jeffrey Way: Very mechanical, soulless. Not an ounce of creativity in it, which couldn't be further from the truth.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: Anyways, I started focusing on that more and more, and the more I got into programming, the less I was into music, and it just slowly faded off.

Matt Stauffer: One of the questions I always ask everybody ... Sorry to cut you off. When did you first get access to a computer, and when did you first start getting into programming?

Jeffrey Way: I'm going to have to apologize, because I was listening to some of your other episodes, and everyone got into programming when they were 10 years old or something. Not for me. Not for me at all.

Matt Stauffer: Oh, that's good.

Jeffrey Way: My first computer wasn't even my computer, of course. It was the family computer. I remember playing Number Munchers, which was this old game on the Mac.

Matt Stauffer: Yes!

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. I think we've talked about that before. I was obsessed with Number Munchers. I'll listen to DHH interviews and he'll talk about when he was seven years old, learning this old language that I've never heard of. That wasn't me, honestly. I didn't even show much interest at all until I was about 17, honestly. Even then, I'd learn a little HTML. Just enough to write a blog post or something like that, but I didn't have any huge fascination with code ... I didn't know what it was, honestly. I was focused on music. But I would say, so much of what I learned from music I feel like has crossed over, weirdly enough. The whole idea of looking for patterns, and shapes, and just the discipline to stick with something that you can't do, and then suddenly you can do it. I feel like that helped me when learning programming, because there's so many things with programming, it's like you just have to sit there for four hours until it clicks in your head.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: I have lots of memories of ... In the early days. I don't do it anymore, but when I was young I'd stay up til 3:00 in the morning just trying to figure something out, because it wouldn't click. Then I love that feeling of all of a sudden, you think, "Oh. I get it."

Matt Stauffer: Glorious revelation.

Jeffrey Way:"I understand how this works now." There's no shortcut. You just have to sit there for hours until it clicks. It is a great feeling.

Matt Stauffer: I had that moment both with object-oriented programming, and unit testing. Obviously I've had much smaller ones, but those were both ones where it took months, and everyone would talk about the thing, and then talk about the thing, and I just didn't get it. Then all of a sudden it was like, "What have I been doing my whole life up until now?"

Jeffrey Way: Right. Right.

Matt Stauffer: A lot of people who have your story, and by the way, I want to totally affirm the fact that I think that if everybody said, "Hey, I started computers when I was seven." Then it would be discouraging to folks who are just getting into it now. There is plenty of space, and even Mohammed's story a little bit had a little bit of the later as well. There's space for anybody to come in at any age and any time. I think that really the most significant thing is, people in our generation, people in the ... Probably, I don't know exactly, but their late 20s to late 30s probably, somewhere around there. We're kind of old millennials or young Gen Xers or whatever. I feel like a lot of us have a similar story, just because in order to be a full-time programmer right now, it's likely that you got into it earlier. Otherwise you wouldn't have had enough history to be a full-time programmer now, but that's not guaranteed. I mean, you're a full-time programmer and have been for years. It's cool to hear a story that's a little bit different than what we've had.

Jeffrey Way: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Matt Stauffer: A lot of people, when they talk about ... Especially since you didn't get to it because you had somebody in the family who's a programmer. You weren't taking classes. A lot of people say, "Well, you know, I played video games, and my clan, I made the clan website," or something. What was it for you?

Jeffrey Way: Oh. My parents were starting this ... Because my mom was a writer, they had this idea for a business. I talked about this at the last Laracon. They had this idea for a business where aspiring songwriters could mail in their tapes, and then you'd get actual professionals to review it, and they would actually record themselves. They'd go over the song. They'd give you advice. This was a long time ago, and then they'd send it back. They'd been talking about this idea for a long time, and I remember it was Christmas night, we went out for Chinese food, when I was ... I don't know how old I was. 19 maybe. We were talking about it, and I said, "You know, I could probably build this website." Once again, not even close. I was so arrogant, so ridiculously arrogant. No, I couldn't build the site, but in my head I was like, "You know what? I could get a book, and I'll just figure it out, and I'll build this for you guys."

Matt Stauffer: Did you know any back-end programming language at all at that point?

Jeffrey Way: No. I knew HTML, and when I created HTML tags, of course they were in all uppercase.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: But that's it. That's all I knew, and I was just thinking, "Oh, I'll go get some programming book." Of course when you think, "Okay, I'm going to learn how to build a website. I need a programming book." You're immediately presented with choices that you're not capable of solving. Like, okay, do you get a PHP book, or are you going to learn Visual Basic, or C#? Do I try ASP.net?

Matt Stauffer: Classic ASP?

Jeffrey Way: It's like, "I don't know what any of these things are. I don't know how to distinguish between a language or a framework, so I have no clue which book to get." I had no clue which book. I had no idea where to start, even remotely, but it was a good adventure, in hindsight.

Matt Stauffer: Do you remember what book you got?

Jeffrey Way: I'm kind of mad at this. My brother recommended I get an ASP.net book.

Matt Stauffer: Oh, yeah.

Jeffrey Way: You know what? In hindsight, I feel like that was bad advice, not to throw him under the bus, but I didn't know ... I knew HTML, but no, I didn't. I knew how to make a bold tag, and an italic tag. But I feel like the advice should have been, "Okay, go find some kind of HTML and CSS for Dummies type book. Learn that. Figure out how to create boxes and move things around." That's really step one, before you even get to programming.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: But no, I kind of started with ASP.net, and I was learning Visual Basic, and then all of a sudden I'm trying to build this site for them, but going through the book it's having me build more little programs, like a little calculator. Making a calculator in Visual Basic really has no relevance to how you would construct a website, but that's what I was learning how to do, and it was cool that I was figuring out, "Oh, I'm making a little crappy calculator here." But it didn't get me any closer whatsoever to building this website.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Jeffrey Way: Then at some point, I worked in .NET for a little while, but then ... It's been so long. At some point, I switched over to PHP, because it seemed ... I switched over to PHP, and I was kind of learning Ruby too, and I think a lot of people do that, where it's like you're not really sure. You kind of experiment with a handful of different languages, but yeah. Eventually I zeroed in on PHP. You know what? Actually looking back, for that website, it was built in ASP.net, actually.

Matt Stauffer: I didn't know that. That's fascinating.

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. It was horrible. A horrible site.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. I've written some ASP.net in my days, and it was not exactly the same, but I was a PHP developer who got an internship at an ASP.net site or company, and I was able to do most of what I needed to do. I was building little reporting front-ends for them in PHP, but every once in a while I had to write ASP.net. Walking into ASP.net and Visual Basic not knowing what you're doing, I feel like is not the same as walking into PHP not knowing what you're doing.

Jeffrey Way: No. No.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. I can imagine.

Jeffrey Way: It was horrible. It's so complicated. Oh my gosh. Still to this day, I feel like my brother told me that just because he worked in the industry too, and maybe he was like, "Oh, this is too hard for you, Jeffrey. Take a look at this book and you'll be scared away."

Matt Stauffer: Is he still a programmer?

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. He is. He hates it. He hates it.

Matt Stauffer: Okay, so you've got both music and programming in the family, then.

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: My brother is a .NET programmer as well.

Jeffrey Way: Oh, he is? Okay.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, but he's the one who originally taught me Vim and PHP, so I can at least credit him for getting me in the right angle.

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. Why didn't you stick with .NET? How did you switch to PHP?

Matt Stauffer: No, he taught me Vim and PHP. He switched over to .NET later.

Jeffrey Way: Oh. Oh, gotcha.

Matt Stauffer: I was doing WordPress at the time, so there's no reason for me to switch.

Jeffrey Way: Okay. Gotcha.

Matt Stauffer: You and Taylor both have .NET in your background.

Jeffrey Way: I know. Isn't that funny?

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. I did .NET at that job and hated it. I was like, "You guys are doing these crazy compile processes, whereas I can build this web base front-end and PHP to give them all the information they need. That's going to take me three days, and it's going to take you guys three weeks and 15 compiles, and this crazy environment, and I can write it in a text editor and get it online in three days."

Jeffrey Way: I know. That was the joy of PHP for me, and I was always amazed because ... Not so much now. It still happens now, but especially way back then, 10 or 15 years ago, PHP just kind of crapped all over.

Matt Stauffer: It sure did.

Jeffrey Way: People would make fun of it. When I came to that from working with ASP and HP.net, it was really nice.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: I was like, "Oh my god. I can just create an HTML file, I'll add a little PHP above the doc type, and then it actually kind of works."

Matt Stauffer: Boom. Dynamic data, right there.

Jeffrey Way: It's like, "Holy crap. This is really nice."

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: I know people trash that way of programming, but to me it was like, "Wow, this is so much simpler than what I've been doing over here."

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, especially if you'd written any ASP. I went from classic ASP to PHP, so at that point, PHP is glorious, because classic ASP was like PHP but not as good, basically. That transition just makes you love PHP. I can understand. You crap on it if it's coming from somewhere else, but there's some places where you come to PHP and it's like the motherland.

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. You got into .NET a little bit. You didn't finish the guitar stuff, so you were out on your own. Were you doing freelance web development, or what were you doing kind of to pass the time, or to pay the bills or whatever for those first couple of years?

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. I did a number of things. I started doing freelance web development. Once again, just so in over my head. The arrogance of thinking I could take on these projects for people when I had six months of experience, but I created a website called Detached Designs. I had this idea in my head that I was a designer, which couldn't be further from the truth.

Matt Stauffer: You and me both.

Jeffrey Way: But that's what it started out as. I was like, "Yeah, I'm going to go custom web design for people." I created Craigslist ads.

Matt Stauffer: Nice.

Jeffrey Way: For some reason, they always got reported as spam. I'm like, "They're not spam, folks. I'm trying to make some money." But anyways, somebody eventually hired me, and one of the first projects I ever did ... I think I talked about this somewhere else. I can't remember, but it was an urn site.

Matt Stauffer: What's that?

Jeffrey Way: Urn as in like when you die, and you're cremated.

Matt Stauffer: Oh, like ceremonial urns.

Jeffrey Way: They put you in, yeah, a decorative urn.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, yeah. Wait, is this the one where you were storing the credit card information?

Jeffrey Way: No. No, no, no. That was another one.

Matt Stauffer: That was later.

Jeffrey Way: No. This was just a simple site. Some woman out of her house was selling decorative urns. So morbid. She wanted me to create a website to show them, and people could pick the one they wanted, but once again, that was horrible.

Matt Stauffer: Was it dynamic, where she could upload them to CMS, or was it just kind of-

Jeffrey Way: No.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, okay. That's what I thought. Just a whole bunch of pictures.

Jeffrey Way: Heck no. I was just proud enough to get the images on the page, honestly.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: I had a nice ... I was probably using a table layout or something. Actually, no. I was learning CSS. I don't know. I might have been fancy there. Probably not. Anyways, yeah. Just a crappy little thing. I don't even know if I had pagination. Probably rather than pagination, I just created ... If there were four pages for the urns, I would just create four HTML pages to show them.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: But you know what? That stuff is good for you. Everyone kind of has to go through that process of just building junk. I made a little money off of it, and I think she eventually abandoned it, but that's okay. It's a good memory.

Matt Stauffer: I was just going to ask if it was still online.

Jeffrey Way: No. I was hoping. I probably could use the Wayback Machine to find it, but I can't even remember what the domain name was.

Matt Stauffer: That was your first paid project?

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. I think I made $350 bucks off that. I was like, "I'm doing it. I'm making some money here. This is the future. I'm all in."

Matt Stauffer: That's amazing. My first one's still online, and I made $200 bucks from it, and it's the same.

Jeffrey Way: Oh, yeah?

Matt Stauffer: They sell flowers. They sell daylilies, and it's the same thing. It's just daylily, after daylily, after daylily, after daylily. Basic stuff. Tabled it out.

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. It's still on ... Well, mine's not still online, so you must have done a much better job.

Matt Stauffer: Gotta see if you can find it on the Wayback Machine, though, and we'll put that in the show notes if you can find it.

Jeffrey Way: Then I did a handful of things along those couple of ... Maybe a year or two. I did one for a Harvard sorority, believe it or not. I don't know why they contacted me on Nashville Craigslist. They were called the Harvard ... I can't even remember their name. They were almost like an acapella group, like Pitch Perfect. It was something like that, and I made their site. They wanted all this hot pink and black. It cracked me up. The whole site was hot pink and black.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Jeffrey Way: That's funny. I'm trying to remember some of the other things I did. It's been so long. It's amazing how quickly that stuff just kind of exits your brain.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. Lots of little small stuff like that.

Matt Stauffer: During that time, you had decided you weren't going to do music anymore. You were still living in that area, and you were just doing freelance web development, and that was kind of your main thing. Were you working together with any other people? Were you married at this point yet? What else were you doing in your life at that point?

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. At this point, I was probably 21, and I was still trying to piece things together, so I didn't feel qualified to try to get a job anywhere as a developer. Even at that time, I was thinking, "Maybe I should go back to school and actually learn this for real." At this point, nope, I wasn't married. I didn't get married until 25, 26. My wife's going to kill me. I can't remember. 2011 is when I got married.

Matt Stauffer: As long as you remember the day and the year, you're good.

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to remember the age. I stuck with that for a while, and then I got a pretty big contract, at least for ... I call it "contract" like it's really fancy. I had just got a pretty cool job working for a company called Sirona, and they create all these medical ... I don't even know what it was. It was just all these medical scan machines that they use. Those things that cost like $500,000 a pop. Somehow, once again, they came to me. It's just idiotic why they would take something that big and give it to a stupid kid who didn't know what he was doing, but somehow I was creating their website, and I was even creating those little brochures and mailer. That's where I learned about mailers that they would send out to people. Suddenly, I was doing design work, and I was buying all these design books I could find. Then I was suddenly making a Flash website for them, which was the worst experience I've ever had.

Matt Stauffer: That was my next question. Did you ever get into Flash?

Jeffrey Way: I got into Flash a little bit, and I hated it, and I was so worried because back then I was thinking, "You know what? This is the future." Just to show you whenever people say, "Where's the web going?" I would have told you back then, "I think Flash is probably the future."

Matt Stauffer: Everybody else would, too. Everyone said it all the time. "Flash is the future. Gotta get into Flash."

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. It's like, anyone who made just kind of traditional websites, it's like, "You can't even begin to compete." Because of course every single client you might work with, they wanted music in the background, and they wanted, when you hovered over a link, they wanted a little sound effect.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: All that old-school stuff from 2005. But yeah, I was thinking, "I gotta learn this. This is going to be the future." But I hated it. I really don't enjoy that aspect of it whatsoever. Then as it turns out, Flash is almost completely dead at this point. I didn't know that back then.

Matt Stauffer: It makes you a little wary of the promises that JavaScript SPAs are going to take over the whole world. It sounds the same as Flash did back then.

Jeffrey Way: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative). It could be true, as well. I'm not sure about SPAs. SPAs are, on one hand they're so cool and they're so responsive, and then on the other hand, so often they break and they don't work.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: Or they suck up memory, and I don't know.

Matt Stauffer: Never let it go.

Jeffrey Way: Sometimes I go to those news sites where there are SPAs and everything is fancy, and you click on a news article, and it slides in, and it's like, "Okay, this is cool, but I'm not sure if this is better."

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: Anyways, that's a tangent, but yeah, I spent a long time working for Sirona, and that's where I kind of built up a lot of my jack of all trades chops, because I was doing a lot of design work, somehow was piecing it together, and then I was doing web work, and Flash work, so I feel like that gave me this huge crash course in just general design and development, that I'm pretty grateful for.

Matt Stauffer: During this time, you weren't playing music anymore. What were your hobbies then?

Jeffrey Way: Code. I'm pretty obsessive.

Matt Stauffer: You were coding all the time?

Jeffrey Way: That was my thing. Like I was saying earlier with guitar, it's like for a lot of people, but for me, it's like if you find the thing, you get hooked. I got the bug, and I was really focused on that. Also, at the time, I dropped out of college, because I was no longer focusing on music. I don't know. College wasn't a great fit for me personally, so I was still thinking, "I need to focus on something." Because you can't just drop out of college and deliver pizza all day.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: I did have the mindset like, "No. I need to be focusing on something." That was my day job, was just during the day, or during the evening I would be reading books every single day. And then during the day, I'd be working on these little projects I got. Then slowly the caliber of project grew and grew, took on some more fancy stuff, got a little more dynamic, so yeah. Interesting.

Matt Stauffer: This is super interesting. I did not realize that this was all part of your story, which is why I was excited to interview you. You dropped out, I think you said you were sometime around 20, 21, and you're doing this freelance stuff. What's the next big transition point? I assume it wasn't straight to there from NetTuts, was it? Where did you go from there?

Jeffrey Way: Probably for four years, maybe, lots of projects that are just me, or me and one or two other people that we tackled together. But I did that for a long time. Lots of freelance stuff. I started a little business to do that with one or two other people. Then I took on NetTuts as side work, because when I take on these projects, the scary thing is, I wasn't at your level even remotely, so it's like I'd get a project, but there's no guarantee that another project's coming in once that's finished.

Matt Stauffer: Oh, yeah. I remember those days.

Jeffrey Way: Right. It was always this kind of terrifying thing. Then I started writing freelance articles. What was the site called? I think it's called Freelancer.com. It's under new ownership at this point, but back then it was ... There were these websites dedicated to freelancers, because it was the first time I think, way back then, when it suddenly became a real possibility that you could work on the computer at home.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: Suddenly they had all these freelancers talking about how to do things, and I was starting to write posts for them kind of for fun. I actually went back and read some of them and they're so horrible. One of them was how, if you're a young freelancer, you have to get an edge over the competition. The way I would do it was to make myself available 24 hours a day. It's so embarrassing at this point, but I was like, "Yeah, if they need me at 2:00 in the morning, I'm going to be available." Like some company's ever going to call me at 2:00 in the morning, but that was my idea of how to stand out, because all the other businesses are 9:00 to 5:00, but I'm going to be 2:00 AM to 2:00 PM, and it was so horrible. It was really embarrassing going back to read that. That's the hard thing about your ideas when you're 19 or 20 or 21. On the web, they are going to be there in 20 more years, and people can go back and find all the stupid crap you wrote, or the forum threads you created where you're asking the most silly, simple questions. It all stays. It never goes away. Scares me sometimes. Yeah. I did that for a long time. After Freelancer, the owner of that website put me in contact with Collis, who is the founder of Envato. I talked to him about NetTuts. Once again, I was like, "Okay, I can make an extra $1,000 a month just kind of learning." Because I was already learning every single day, and then just showing people what I'd learned. I did that kind of on the side. I did both of them simultaneously for ... I'm not sure. I can't remember. A year? Then they asked me to run NetTuts, and I took over that, and then suddenly I was doing this whole other thing where I was focusing on education, and building up a platform, which I had never done before. It was interesting. It was fun.

Matt Stauffer: Were you still doing any freelance work, or did you transition to just a full-time NetTuts at that point?

Jeffrey Way: Well, while I was writing for NetTuts, I was still doing both. But then when I transferred over to ... Actually, no. I managed NetTuts for a while. Maybe a year or two while I was still doing both. Then I started taking on more roles at Envato.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: I was helping out with some of the marketplaces that Envato has, like Graphic River, or Theme Forest, or Code Canyon. I was really starting to focus more in that area, so I stopped doing freelance stuff, which I was very happy about. It's a hard life doing freelance stuff on Craigslist. It's hard work. Hard work.

Matt Stauffer: I don't want to talk too much about me, but I did the freelance in that same world, and actually that was part of the reason that I left web for half a decade, or I don't even know however long. For a long time.

Jeffrey Way: Oh, yeah?

Matt Stauffer: Because I hated freelance. I hated that pressure to always come up with the next work. I just wanted to do good work, right? You're doing good work and convincing more people you can do good work, and finding the people to convince, and worrying about your finances all the time. The promise of just stability is something I don't think that a lot of people kind of speak up about enough. You're just like, "Yeah, there's going to be a paycheck." And you get to just worry about doing the thing you want, and let somebody else worry about getting the work coming in.

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. It's so much more stress. If you have a traditional job, you go there 9:00 to 5:00. You get your paycheck. You're good. Once you leave work, you don't think about it again. But when you're freelancing, it's like, yes, you're doing that work, but when you're not working, you're stressing about how you're going to get more work and how you're going to pay next month's rent, because every month on the first, your income goes back to zero. Now you have to figure out, "Okay, how do I pay the rent this month?" And then the next month, goes back to zero. Everything resets. Yeah. It'll wear you down for sure.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, so you transition. You're full-time at NetTuts and Envato. Outside of the things with the other properties, just your work at NetTuts, what was your day to day like at that point? What kind of stuff were you responsible for?

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. At NetTuts, my main role was build up. Build up this product. That is prime. NetTuts actually got very big. It makes me sad, because big change did a lot, and I don't think it's as popular anymore. I don't visit it as much anymore, because they kind of merged ... The whole idea, to give you a quick recap, they launched this tutorial site called PSDTuts, which was like Photoshop tutorials, and it was huge. Then they started branching, and they're like, "Maybe we should do this same concept for web development." So they had NetTuts, and then they were like, "Let's do another one. Let's branch out." And they kept branching out over and over, but all this time I was really focused on NetTuts. That's all I cared about, and then they decided, probably correctly, "We need to merge everything into this one cohesive whole where people can learn anything." It makes sense, but then also from my perspective, it's like, "Well, I don't care about Photoshop tutorials or craft tutorials, but now you've merged everything together and I no longer feel like the site is for me."

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: But I feel like they had to do it, looking back. They had no choice. They had to do it, because they were maintaining a dozen different tutorial sites, and each one of those were their own WordPress installations, so when you would make a change, I'm pretty sure they were having to make that change 10 different times across each installation. It's horrible. It makes sense that they merged it.

Matt Stauffer: If there was a technical consideration, it does make you wonder whether some aspect of multi-site might have ended up being something, so you can make the right business decision without allowing the technology to make the call for you, but who knows what all was involved in that decision.

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Anyways, a lot of my day to day was suddenly I was an editor. I had never done any of this before. So often in my life, I've gotten thrown into things that I wasn't the least bit qualified for. That might be my fault, just saying, "Oh, yeah. I can do that. Of course." When I had no clue what it meant to be an editor, but suddenly I was doing a lot of writing on my own, but also finding writers and working with developers, and figuring out how that plays, and editing their work. Suddenly I was editing the writing of people 20 years older than me, which was crazy.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: One of the coolest things about this, though, I found was that back then I had this idea of my heroes, web developer people I really looked up to, but I'd never contacted them before. Then suddenly I realized, "They're just people exactly like you and me."

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: In no way, shape, or form are they actors, celebrity types. They're just regular people, and if you message them, or email them, or Tweet them, they're really friendly, and they'll reply back. That was a very cool thing for me, because it was like, "Oh, I've read all of your books."

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Jeffrey Way:"I know you. You taught me how to write CSS." Then I contact them, and they're pretty cool. Then suddenly they were writing for NetTuts. I would get them to contribute articles and stuff.

Matt Stauffer: That's awesome.

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. It was a fun experience. I did that for about five years, and then throughout that whole thing I ended up taking on a bunch of roles at Envato, so I was doing a lot of things, but once again, I just kind of burned out.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: I think it's good as much as you can to sometimes switch to new things, to always have new projects you're working on. I think sometimes if you stick with exactly one project, it starts to wear you down.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Yeah. I like talking to independent creators and founders to try and figure out, "What are you able to do to ensure that this one thing that you're working on doesn't just kind of burn you out?" One of my buddies, Matt Green, he went from working at a consultancy, we worked at the same consultancy, to now he's the sole tech and web guy at this very large multi-national corporation. On the one hand, he gets to do really creative things. He's on a single project, and he gets ... Every time a new tech comes out, he's like, "Cool. I'll throw it in here if it's useful." He gets to use tech that I might never get to use, because I never had a project that has it, but in the same token, he's on that same project every day for years. I'm always curious, "What does it look like for somebody who's in that kind of a space, to make sure that you don't get bored of working on it?"

I know for you, one of the things that you do is redesigns. Obviously also, you've got the content, right? When you cover a new piece of content, maybe you're not applying that content to the Laracasts code base, but you're writing little sample projects and stuff. What, in your day to day with Laracasts, does it look like to help yourself kind of get that shift? Or are you not able to get it, and at one point you're going to shut Laracasts down and we'll all kind of fall into despair?

Jeffrey Way: Probably fall into despair. No. I try to have a lot of variety, because I think, once again, Laracasts is my main product, so I do think about that. "What if you burn out on it?" But I think what's helped me a lot is having lots of different things, so it's not just like I focus on the Laracasts code base, and I don't just focus on content for Laracasts, which often is creating demos and stuff. But also, I have open source projects that I maintain. I have lots of different little projects where it keeps me interested, I think. Where I can say, "Okay, today I'm exclusively focusing on Laravel Mix." That is completely different than the type of code I write for Laracasts. Then if I'm done with that, then I will completely focus on some demo or something, which is really fun. Most developers don't get the opportunity to just tinker, because you have a job. You have to get the job done. You don't always have the ability to try out some new language or tool, but Laracasts kind of affords me that, where I can dedicate a day or two a week, or at least a half day a couple times a week, and just tinker around. Try out new stuff, see how it works.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: I'm really fortunate for that.

Matt Stauffer: I mean, you could build a whole clone of Facebook and basically call it a part of the development process.

Jeffrey Way: Absolutely.

Matt Stauffer: Or a whole forum software, or whatever. It's legitimate, too. Honestly, you could build the whole thing and not even make any videos about it, and it would have expanded your brain or given you some perspective that nobody else would have had.

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Matt Stauffer: That's cool.

Jeffrey Way: So often, the content I do for Laracasts is usually the result of actual coding work I'm doing. About a month ago, I implemented this really sweet new Algolia Search into Laracasts, where it's like live on the fly. It's really great. But I was like, "Okay. I have this figured out. Most people don't have it figured out yet, so those are a perfect two or three videos that I can do for the site." I feel like those are the best types of content I can do, because I don't know. It's really hard as a teacher. I know you don't want to focus on this too much, but just real quick.

Matt Stauffer: No, it's good. It's good.

Jeffrey Way: As a teacher, if you're too separated from the person learning, they can't under ... The things you take for granted, and the things you don't even realize you take for granted, they don't take for granted. You'll use terminology that's just part of your everyday speak, and they don't know what it means.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: It's like you sometimes need to be ... It's that same thing where in school, sometimes the kid sitting next to you can teach a concept way better than the teacher can.

Matt Stauffer: Yup.

Jeffrey Way: It's that same thing, because they're on your same wavelength, and they know where you're struggling. I always worry the more I figure things out and the better I become, the further separated I am from somebody who's just learning PHP for the first time.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: I have to deal with it. I get this a lot, where somebody's like, "Slow down. You're going too fast." Or other people will say, "You're going too slow. Speed up." Or somebody will say, "You keep using fancy jargon, and I hate that idea of using fancy jargon." And usually it's just, it's the term for this. I'm not trying to show off here. It's just the term for it, but I forget, "Oh, you don't know what that term is." These are the things I always end up thinking about when I create content for Laracasts. It's very hard. It's very hard to walk that line.

Matt Stauffer: I've talked with, asked Taylor a lot about what are the steps that he takes to make sure that, as he's updating the documentation, he can put himself in the mindset of a new learner. It sounds like one of the things you're saying is, when you learn something, that's the best time to teach it, right? When you're trying a new thing, because you're closest to the wire of the learner. Are there any other things other than putting yourself in a learner's posture by learning new things, or any other things you find that you do that helps you kind of remember that perspective?

Jeffrey Way: That perspective of what makes it easier to learn?

Matt Stauffer: Well, yeah, that and just you've been doing this for a long time. Are there relationships you have, or comments, threads that you look at, or postures you take, or mental exercises, or something that helps you keep yourself grounded to the experience of the person who opened up Laracasts for the first time yesterday, versus who's been with you for the last X years?

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. Nothing that I could describe, I don't think. It's usually just trying to remind myself to assume ... Don't assume too much. I don't know. I love that phrase, "Explain to me like I'm a five-year-old." There's actually a Reddit group for that that I always read. The whole concept is, "Explain this thing to me like I'm a five-year-old." It'll be anything. It'll be politics, or anything really. I love it, because everyone who replies is very friendly, and they just explain it perfectly. They don't use anything too fancy. They're not trying to show off. They're not trying to make you look stupid. They're just trying to explain this concept to you. That's what I try to do as best as I can, but I'm pretty sure many times I completely fail. Sometimes people will cancel their accounts and just say, "It was way too hard."

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: It makes me sad, but that's how it is. With Laracasts, I'm training people who have six months of experience total, and then also working professional developers watch the site too, and the understanding they have about code couldn't be further apart. How do you do a video that appeals to both of them? It's very, very difficult.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. I mean, you do it masterfully, but it's cool to hear that it's an ongoing process of trying to be mindful, and trying to figure it out, and recognizing you're not perfect at it, but you kind of have what you have to give, and that's all there is.

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. I try to take the approach of, "This is what I've figured out. Could be right. I'm not trying to say this is the right way. I really hate that idea, but this is what I've figured out at this moment. If I change my mind, I'll let you know, but ..."

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. That's cool. We have talked about, you were spending your time in NetTuts while it was NetTuts. While it was NetTuts, I followed it religiously, so I should remember this, but I know it was covering front-end web development and a little bit of design, stuff like that. How much did NetTuts get into the back-end?

Jeffrey Way: A decent amount. Once again, for a site like that, you can't just do everything. Because the more you stretch, and it's like, "We're going to cover every element of web development." It's that exact thing again where it's like, "Well now nobody really cares, because there's a one in 20 chance that an article is going to be relevant."

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Jeffrey Way: We predominantly focused on PHP and then HTML, CSS, JavaScript. But then sometimes, we would branch out to Node and Python, but those were always every once in a while, but you gotta keep the core of a specific type of developer. I definitely learned that from NetTuts. Yeah, we did ... Go ahead.

Matt Stauffer: When did you get started doing videos?

Jeffrey Way: At NetTuts. No, actually before then. When I launched that little business called Detached Designs, where I was doing my own stuff, even then I would record ... I was learning ASP.net, and there was this guy named Joe Stagner, and on the ASP.net website, he would record videos for learning ASP.net, and it was so beneficial to me. For whatever reason, you either have a visual ... You're either a visual learner, or you're not. I realized when I would watch him, I would learn so much more than reading these books. I started doing the same thing. You could probably track down really old videos of mine where I was teaching ASP.net. Please don't, because they're horrid. They're unbelievably horrible.

Matt Stauffer: I gotta find one and put it in the show notes.

Jeffrey Way: Please don't, because it's really, really bad. It was probably recorded at like 600 by 400 and really blurry. People forget, we take the idea of a clear code screen cast for granted. It was not easy to do that. YouTube can do that all the time, but way back then, you would upload a screen cast to YouTube, and they would compress it so much that you couldn't read it even at the top quality. It was a serious issue that a lot of people had, unless you could afford to stream at the high quality, but then most people didn't have fast enough bandwidths to watch it. It was an actual thing people had to worry about back then.

I was recording these Detached Designs video tutorials on ASP.net. It feels like another world, but that's when I got started. When was that? Maybe 2003? 2004? Right around there.

Matt Stauffer: I was going to say, it didn't seem like you had started at NetTuts, because by the time you were doing them there, you seemed really accomplished as a presenter, but I didn't know whether that's because you had been doing it prior, or whether it just comes that naturally to you.

Jeffrey Way: I don't know. Maybe a little of both. I think sometimes people give me a little too much credit. I'll see this on Twitter a lot, where somebody will say, "I have a lot more respect for Jeffrey now because I just tried to record a video tutorial, and my gosh is it hard." I think they're thinking I hit record, and then I just fluently go through the whole thing, and then 30 minutes later I hit stop. That's not the way it works. I probably make 50 mistakes over that course, and then I just chop them up during the edit. I think other people think, "If I screw up, I have to start all over and record again." It's like, "No." It's very, very difficult to do that fluently with code. Very, very difficult. Almost impossible.

Matt Stauffer: That's so valuable to hear that. I've done some videos before, and when I felt like I had to do it the whole way ... Especially you're talking five, 10, 15 minutes, there's just no way. You could script it, you can practice it 15 times, and you're still going to make mistakes. Then when I first bring somebody on the podcast who's never podcasted before, one of the first disclaimers I have to make is, "Just because you hit the record button doesn't mean you now have to be you're in front of a TV camera live." This isn't live, which means you can just flub it, and you can say, "Oh, you know what? I want to say that again." I'll just edit it out later. That's all possible. You just don't think about that by default.

Jeffrey Way: Right. Right. I know. You think you're on camera, doing the weather or something, and you have to get it perfect.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Jeffrey Way: Nope. Nope. I make so many mistakes. If you would see my Screenflow program after I'm done editing, there's 100 different cuts. Sometimes I'll say "uh" too much, which I hate. I'm probably doing it here like crazy. I hate that. I always try to edit that out. Little things. If I pause too long. Sometimes you're coding something and I'll be recording, and it won't work. It's like, "Oh. That's supposed to work, and it's failing." Then you'll see two minutes of silence on the video once I'm done, and I just edit that out. Then suddenly you think, "Oh, Jeffrey figured that out in four seconds." No. It took a few minutes to figure out what the problem was.

Matt Stauffer: I remember when I first started Twitch streaming, I was just ... I said, "This is an antidote to anybody having any elevated concept of me." Because you'd watch how much of my time is spent reading documentation and Stack Overflowing, and beating my head against a simple typo that everybody who watches the video will notice, but it wasn't in my brain at that moment, and I would go back, and I'm like, "Why am I doing this to myself? Why am I exposing how stupid I am to the whole world?"

Jeffrey Way: Yours were good too. There's definitely a charm to that, though, as well. I love to watch ... I wish you would do them more. I know Adam does some. I don't think he's done any recently as well.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: But there's a charm to that approach too, because everyone knows that that's part of it. There's fun watching a person figure something out, like, "Okay, we're going to go to Reddit. We're going to read the documentation. How do I do this?" There's a charm to that as well. It's just for Laracasts I'm trying to keep it a little more condensed.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, yeah. For sure.

Jeffrey Way: But I think you need both, actually. Once again, people may watch a video and think I'm way more talented than I am. It's like, "No. I'm piecing things together. You just don't see the part where I went to Reddit."

Matt Stauffer: Right. Right.

Jeffrey Way: Because something didn't work.

Matt Stauffer: That's cool.

Jeffrey Way: Not Reddit. Stack Overflow.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, Stack Overflow. Okay. NetTuts, eventually they gathered everything together in one space, and at that point you started feeling like it wasn't something you could buy in on as much. That probably planted a seed in your brain to start moving on to something else. Around this point, I assume that you had made some connection to Laravel, but I remember that for me and a lot of other people, the Jeffrey Way who we've learned to trust over years, giving his really strong backing to Laravel pretty early, was a big part of us being willing to make that jump. Can you tell me a little bit about what your early exposure to Laravel looked like?

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. I had left PHP quite a bit at that point, other than one or two lingering projects I had. I was mostly Ruby work. I was doing a lot of Ruby, some Sinatra stuff, some Rails stuff, and it was great. I really enjoyed it. Then I came across Laravel. This would have been right at the end of Laravel 2, maybe. I don't know. The time span between Laravel 1 and Laravel 3 was actually really short.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: It's not like Laravel 4 to Laravel 5.

Matt Stauffer: We're talking months.

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. Months. I think I more or less got in right when he was working on it. I guess he was promoting Laravel 3 at that time, so I was like, "Okay, I'll check this out." And immediately I noticed that the branding was really good, and the design was great. You just didn't see this much back then. People think about it a little more now, but back then it wasn't very good. Suddenly I was like, "Oh, this branding is right on point. The layout is good. I'm reading through the documentation. It's really well thought-out. I'm going to give this a go." I started tinkering around with it, and I was like, "Oh my gosh. This is great. This works really, really well."

Matt Stauffer: Nice.

Jeffrey Way:"It has a lot of what I like from Sinatra. It has a lot of what I like from Rails." I would love to know how much Taylor experimented with these other frameworks when building Laravel, because my instinct is, he didn't do it that much, but then he must have because Laravel has some of the best components of each of these. It has active record, of course, from Rails. Some of the routing syntax from Sinatra was very similar in Laravel. I kept tinkering with it more, and I started becoming more and more outspoken, and I was participating on the ... There used to be a Laravel forum, a dedicated Laravel.com forum. It doesn't exist anymore, but I was asking a question there and Taylor immediately responded, and he was really nice. It was the first time I ever talked to him, and he said something like, "If you need any help whatsoever, just let me know. Glad to help." I was like, "Oh. This is a really friendly guy. Created a great product. I'm immediately talking to the owner of it. I'm going to give this a go." It just kept getting better and better. The more outspoken I was, because I was still working at NetTuts at that time, I was able to kind of give Laravel a really big push. Suddenly I was doing Laravel tutorials and videos.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Jeffrey Way: I like to think I really helped Laravel get a push in the early days.

Matt Stauffer: Yes.

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. It was great.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. NetTuts, Laravel. What was the process like of deciding to leave NetTuts, and what was the process like of deciding to found Laracasts, and how connected were the two?

Jeffrey Way: Very connected. Too connected, probably, in hindsight. I was getting to the point with Envato where I was feeling that burnout a little bit. I was starting to notice things where it's like I didn't like ... I bet a lot of people have this with their companies, where you start to feel like your opinion isn't actually factoring into decisions.

Matt Stauffer: Yup.

Jeffrey Way: I think as a manager, you have to be very careful with this, where if you feel if you make a person feel like their opinion isn't really relevant, or you make them feel like, "Okay, thanks for your opinion." In one ear, out the other. I was starting to feel that more and more. Maybe it was just in my head, but I wanted to have more control over the direction of things, and I was starting to get the hint, like, "It's not going to happen." I started thinking, "Well, what if I made my own NetTuts, but it would be focused on Laravel? Because I'm really into Laravel right now. It's great. I'd love to give that a push. I can do that on the side." In my warped head, I was thinking that would be okay, but it's a huge conflict of interest, in hindsight.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Jeffrey Way: On the side, I was building up Laracasts while still running NetTuts, and doing all the stuff at Envato. Then at one point, yeah, I launched Laracasts and I kind of had to put in my notice at Envato, because we decided it was very much a conflict of interest, but yeah. They were very, very connected. The big idea for me wasn't just to build Laracasts, it was just to have something where I had more control, and where I felt like my opinion actually mattered, and where I could say, "This is what I want to do." And then suddenly the next week, you're actually working on that.

Matt Stauffer: It happens. Yup.

Jeffrey Way: At Envato, Envato grew so quickly. By the way, I don't want to shame Envato in the least, because I think Envato is a fantastic company, and what they've done is unbelievable, and they're incredibly generous. Every year, they donate so much money to all of these different causes. I'm saying this more just in working at any business, you sometimes get to a point where you feel like you need a change. "I need a little more say in things. I want to feel like my opinion actually matters." That was kind of the impetus for starting Laracasts.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. I can't believe that we're already at time, but we're already at time, but I can't cut it just yet. I've got to figure out what of my many remaining questions I'm going to ask. Just for a fun one, a while back you talked about working four-hour days, and switching up kind of what your relationship to work looked like. You and I joked together a little about how viable that was, but what I love is the idea that the 9 to 5, the working for somebody else, all those things might not be the only way to succeed. But I also always have a lot of caveats from my experience working as a freelancer about just how miserable being a freelancer can be at some times. I think people think, "I don't want to work for myself. I want to start my own company." I always tell them, "If you start your own company, and you have employees, you're going to spend more time managing than doing the thing you want to do." Or the other piece is, "I don't want to work for somebody else. I'll go freelance." Then I talk about all the things we've talked about here.

You kind of have a little bit of all these experiences. Now, you don't have full-time employees at Laracasts, so maybe you haven't gotten to that misery part, but it seems like you got the sweet spot where you're not worrying as much about getting the next client. Now, obviously if everybody unsubscribed, there would be a problem, so there's still a concern, but you also have agency and control. Knowing that not everybody is going to go start a Laracasts, but also having said things in the past, you've talked about how 9 to 5 doesn't work for everybody. You've talked about how college doesn't work for everybody. Do you have any advice that you would give to the myriad PHP and Laravel developers who are listening to this right now that might help them explore maybe a little bit less traditional ways of doing our jobs?

Jeffrey Way: Sure. It's difficult, right? Because what makes sense for somebody may not make sense for other people. I think some people very much thrived in college, and they consider it one of the greatest decisions they made. Some people I think need that 9 to 5 job. Other people, it doesn't work for them. It's a very difficult thing. It all comes back to personality, which we've talked about. The four-hour workday, for anyone ... Matt's given me a little trash over this. I recorded a podcast a long time ago, right when I had a baby, and I was experimenting with this idea of two hours two times. The idea was, right when my baby was born, for anyone who has kids, it's very hard. It's very hard.

Matt Stauffer: It's very hard.

Jeffrey Way: Because I ran my own business, it wasn't like I could just say, "Okay, I'm taking three months off." Because if I take three months off, there's nobody there to respond to your support request. I took two weeks off, but then beyond that, I was trying to do a little bit. I was experimenting with this idea of two hours, two times. Of where I would take two hours in the morning, and really focus. No social media, no Telegram, nothing. Just serious focus for a full two hours. It's actually amazing what you can get done in a two-hour span if you're seriously focusing, when most people don't. Most people, you do a little bit and then suddenly we're talking on Telegram, and that's 10 minutes, and you're like, "Oh, god. I gotta get back to work."

My idea was doing that two different times, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. My hope was that four hours total, if you really focus, can equal the seven or eight hours that most people do.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Jeffrey Way: In hindsight, probably not.

Matt Stauffer: But I love it as an experiment. I love the fact that you're asking those questions.

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. You know what? I actually did get a lot. It was enough for that period when the baby was born, where I really needed to focus a lot of my energy on the baby, and of course my wife, who had a hard time. It was a good experiment, and I think that's the important thing, is just to ask questions and change things up. The whole idea of a 9 to 5 or a Monday through Friday, somebody invented that not that long ago. Somebody decided, "Oh, this is optimal. We're going to have people do Monday through Friday, eight hours a day." But it was just some guy who thought it up. That doesn't mean that that's the rule. Some companies are now embracing four-day work weeks, where they have Friday, Saturday, Sunday off. Some are trying this idea of still 40 hours, but you do 10 hours a day, four days a week. I like that people are experimenting with different ways, but I even notice some days if I take a short day or something, I feel bad, because I think, "Well, 9 to 5 is the ..."

Matt Stauffer: Standard.

Jeffrey Way:"It's the standard. It's the responsible adult way, but I stopped at 2:00 and I'm a terrible person." I have to remind myself, "Nope. You do the work that you need to do." It is hard with the 9 to 5 with some people, because it just depends on your job, but sometimes you got most of your work done by 3:00 or 4:00, and then you see workers kind of just hanging for an hour, you know?

Matt Stauffer: Yup.

Jeffrey Way: They're sneaking social media in, or something like that. Not sneaking, but you know what I mean, right?

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Absolutely.

Jeffrey Way: Where it's like, they're filling in the time because they're basically-

Matt Stauffer: Their brain is too dead to actually do the work at the end of the day anyway.

Jeffrey Way: Right.

Matt Stauffer: You're already thinking about the evening.

Jeffrey Way: Right. Right.

Matt Stauffer: But you're stuck there.

Jeffrey Way: But you're stuck there. I hate that too, because it's like, well, it should be if you've done ... Like, we should have enough faith in the people who work for us that if they're done, they got everything they could, then they should go. But there's that thing like, "I gotta wait til 5:00." Or, "I gotta wait til 5:30 before I can go home, even though I was basically done at 4:00." That's a hard thing. I don't know how to deal with it. I just like that people are experimenting with different ways of doing things at this point.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Yeah. I like that. I mean, I love the idea that the 9 to 5 can get in the way for us to really be present for our families in the ways we want to be, and as someone who's been very vocally in support of the idea that, "Hey, I get up in the morning, I put on my dress clothes, I go to a remote office, not at my house, and I work a 9 to 5, and I come home, even though I don't have to." I own the company and I'm a remote worker, so I don't have to, so I see a lot of value there. I'm very much the type that that works for me, but even so, I still see the moments where I miss something that happened with my son when he comes home from school in the middle of the day or whatever else.

The good thing is that I have enough freedom that I just build that into it, and so I think one of the things I've found the most that maybe would go towards, "Hey, if you're working a 9 to 5, maybe one step in Jeffrey's direction is seeing if you can split up the day a little bit." My wife really wanted to go back and take acting classes for a while, so for a while there, every Tuesday and Thursday or something like that, I came home at 10:00 AM and took care of my son for a while while my wife went off to school. She came back home, and then I worked, and then I just worked an extra hour and a half at the end of the day or something. Not only was that cool for her to be able to do that, but actually I found that splitting up the day that way was actually really interesting on my focus. That's why I love what you're talking about. You're like, "Can I actually focus more by doing basically a two-hour Pomodoro twice a day?"

Jeffrey Way: Exactly.

Matt Stauffer: If anybody hasn't heard about Pomodoro, just go Google "Pomodoro." I'll put it in the show notes. It's that same kind of thinking, of like your brain can't be full focus for eight hours straight. That's what I took the most away from what you were saying, at least with that, is you're just not going to be that productive.

Jeffrey Way: Yeah. We're not designed that way.

Matt Stauffer: Right. That's cool. All right. Well, my gosh. I can't believe how much longer I could talk, but I've been swearing to try and keep these close to an hour. Are there parts of your story, or your motivation, or your day to day that kind of you feel like we haven't gotten to touch on yet?

Jeffrey Way: No. I think we covered most of it, actually.

Matt Stauffer: I like it.

Jeffrey Way: Short of getting into unrelated things, like politics, which we don't want to do. I think we're good. I think we're good.

Matt Stauffer: I will throw out one thing, and you can respond to this or not. I think that Jeffrey is one of my favorite people to talk poltiics with, because he does not put up with partisan bullcrap in either direction.

Jeffrey Way: Bullcrap.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. He does have his own opinions, but he's loath to let them be known too much, because he's too busy poking holes in both sides of the partisan, and I like it. I try to be as mid-level as I can be, but as someone who's really interested in social justice and stuff, I will lean a little left at times, and broaching any of those topics in a conversation with Jeffrey, I'm confident that nobody's going to ... He's not going to let me sit there with an unexamined position. I don't know if you want to say anything about that, but I appreciate that.

Jeffrey Way: No. I think you and I agree far more than you give us credit for, but-

Matt Stauffer: No. We do, but you're a good devil's advocate, if nothing else, right? It's not even that we disagree, but you push things to be examined, and I appreciate that a lot about you.

Jeffrey Way: Good. Thank you. I appreciate that. This was fun. I had a lot of fun doing this.

Jeffrey Way: I buy custom domain names for main series that I'm trying to promote. You can go to Vuecasts.com, but it's just going to Laracasts. All you need to remember is Laracasts.com. Check it out.

Matt Stauffer: I like it. Jeffrey, this was a ton of fun. I tell this to everybody, and it's true every time. I could talk for another two hours and enjoy it.

Jeffrey Way: It's amazing how quickly it goes by.

Matt Stauffer: I know. Blowing my mind. Jeffrey, thanks for your time. This is a ton of fun.

Matt Stauffer: Welcome back to the Laravel podcast. This week, I'm talking with Mohamed Said, Laravel's first employee. But he's also a freediver who lives in what looks like a vacation paradise. Stay tuned to learn more!

Matt Stauffer: All right, welcome back to the Laravel podcast. I'm not even going to be counting these interviews, who knows which number ... Number fifty-trillion, podcast, episode, season 3, words ... I don't even know. I've got Mohamed Said. Mohamed has done quite a few interviews, because it's really special. He's the first employee of Laravel, and Laravel is the most popular PHP framework. It's got a lot going on for it, and it's kind of like a one-man show. There's this idea of the BDFL, the "Benevolent Dictator For Life", being Taylor Orwell. We both have, first of all, the first non-Taylor person working for Laravel, who is Mohamed, but we also have the first idea where you seen an open-source framework, you're comparing to an Angular and an Ember or someone like that, who just kind of has the BDFL, and then hired an employee. Taylor created Laravel LLC, which is a company named Laravel, and that company has an employee.

So, it's a little bit of a different working arrangement, and also, a lot of people hadn't heard of Mohamed when he got hired. He's actually already had an interview on the Laravel News podcast, he's already been interviewed by Stack Overflow. I'm hoping that we're going to be able to cover a little bit more, and a little bit of different things, maybe. I don't want to cover exactly the same territory, but I just wanted to point out -- if you had never heard of Mohamed before, you obviously have never put in an issue or pull request to the Laravel core, because he's really been very active in all those spaces for quite a while, together of course with a team of volunteers. He also writes on Medium, he also develops his own features, he's got a couple of other packages. Mohamed is a man around the Laravel community that has been doing a lot of stuff, so I'm really excited to get to talk to him.

Before I start asking you questions, Mohamed, why don't you say hi and just give us the basic picture of who you are and what you're about, when you first meet someone, how do you tell them what you're about and what you're interested in and what you do, and where you're from and anything else? Say whatever you've got to say, and then we'll go from there.

Mohamed Said: Okay. First, my name is Mohamed Said. I live in Hurghada, Egypt. Hurghada is a small city on the Red Sea. I work as a web developer at Laravel with Taylor Otwell. I've been working with Taylor for the past year or so, and that's pretty much how I describe myself to listeners about Laravel, but one of the things that I usually mention when I speak with anyone -- that I love to dive, to dive into the ocean. If I am a Laravel developer, I am also a free diver, and that's the two parts of me. That's me.

Matt Stauffer: Very cool. I think that when I follow you, the three things I get about you are, I get that you love to dive. I don't know anything about that, so I definitely have some questions for you there. I know that you're married and that you'll often reference your wife. Actually, in one of your interviews, you mention that of the things you tend to do, it's program, dive, and shop with your wife. So I might go somewhere there. Programming, diving, and shopping with your wife. So, you didn't originally live in Hurghada - is Cairo, is that where you were originally, and then once you started working with him you moved to Hurghada, is that how it worked?

Mohamed Said: Yeah, I am originally from Cairo. I lived there all my life until one year ago. Cairo is like a group of four large cities that grew up massively to become one large, huge city. So, you kind of find a huge crowd of people on every corner. It became very crowded, and very noisy, so me and a couple of friends, we tried to think like, other options, if we would like to live in a better place, or so. Each one of us picked one of the cities that we would like to move to, and my choice was Hurghada, because I love being around the sea, I love meeting different kinds of people, and the interesting thing about Hurghada is that it is full of foreigners, like tourists and residents who are not from Egypt. That's very interesting for me, because I get to meet people from different nationalities, and I get to make friends from different point of views, and so on.

That's why I picked Hurghada, and me and my wife, we traveled to Hurghada for two weeks to test the waters. We really liked it so much, and we decided just to move. Maybe that was December 2016, around a year ago.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. I love learning about where people are from, and what they're about. One of the things that I did was I opened up KAYAK for looking up flights, and I just said, you know what, if I were to leave out of Orlando, which is my closest major international airport, and I were to go to Hurghada, what would it take? What it told me was, the affordable option is around one thousand U.S. dollars. That is a multi-stage flight, with going through JFK and, I think, Cairo. It says Hurghada International Airport, but it's obviously not big enough that I could fly directly into it. But, it's a big enough airport that I could basically go out of my next major hub, which is JFK for me, and then over to Cairo, and then over to Hurghada, it would take me about nineteen hours to get there. Have you ever considered -- we'll go lots of different places -- have you ever considered pulling a Michael Durinda and all those other folks, and flying the holy over to U.S. for a Laracon? Is that something that might be in the cards for you one day?

Mohamed Said: Yeah, I'd definitely do it. I tried to do that for the past couple of Laracons, but I couldn't really arrange it for myself to fly to the states. But, I will definitely do it if I get the chance.

Matt Stauffer: Cool. So, Hurghada -- I love getting context about things -- Hurghada is a touristy, beach city, it's right on the Red Sea. Cairo is a big, metropolitan hub. You said it's four cities that have kind of grown up together, and it's really massive. Hurghada, does it feel very big?

Mohamed Said: Hurghada, it's not very big and not very small. You can drive around Hurghada in less than thirty minutes, from the beginning of the city to the end of it, because it's two roads on the sea. If you are driving on the street that is directly on the sea, from the start to the end, you can do it in thirty minutes.

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

Mohamed Said: So it's not very big and not very small, but it has a lot of different kind of people from different nationalities. That makes it feel even more rich than Cairo. In Cairo, you get to meet a lot of people everywhere, it's very crowded. Hurghada is not as crowded, but with the diversity, it makes it a rich city, not just a small city that you just go and relax. There are a lot of activities, and a lot of people to meet here, and that's why I like it in the first place.

Matt Stauffer: It seems like the best of both worlds, where it's both kind of small. There's only around two hundred and fifty thousand people, which, I complain about how small Gainesville is where I live, and the Gainesville metro area is over two hundred and fifty thousand people, but it's also spread out, so it's not super compact. Also, one of the problems with Gainesville is it's hard to get anywhere, and there's not as much of an international vibe, which you just mentioned. So you're getting a small, easily travelable place where the population density isn't too high, you're meeting people from all over, and ... Anybody who's listening to this, just pause for a second and go Google Hurghada, "H-u-r-g-h-a-d-a", and just go to Google images. It's just luxurious, beautiful blue and teal ocean vista after vista, it's just gorgeous. You can also just follow Mohamed on any social media platform, and you'll know. Pretty much all he's doing is just being in a vacation commercial every single day. Every picture you get is just you diving through the most beautiful water I've ever seen, it's kind of unbelievable.

Mohamed Said: The water here is very amazing.

Matt Stauffer: Hurghada is five hours away from Cairo, so there's a lot of people who are five hours away from just absolutely beautiful vacation destinations. There's a lot of different things that hold us back from doing what you did, pulling up your roots and moving to this beautiful place where you can do these things you want. I want to talk a little bit about some of the things that might have kept you from moving over there. For starters, is your family all still back in Cairo, and if so, has it been hard being so far away from them? Or was that a pretty easy decision to make?

Mohamed Said: No, it wasn't easy, because it took us two years to make that move, because all of the family and friends are living in Cairo. Also, I had to be in Cairo for work purposes. I just started working remotely one year before the move. So, we had a lot of attachments in Cairo, either me and my wife, because she used to work at a teaching assistant in the university in Cairo.

It took us around two years for us to get ready for the move, and I keep telling my friends, I keep encouraging them to get out of Cairo and try to experience other places, but I know how difficult it can be, so I just hope that people give it a chance and try to move there for a limited amount of time, not just to make the final decision. Just to try it for two weeks or three weeks or so before they can feel good about it, and can sacrifice all of the attachments that they have in Cairo and move to a new city, or it just doesn't worth it. I try to convince people to make the move, but it's not easy. I understand that.

Matt Stauffer: When you decided to do that two-week trip -- I think that's a really cool idea, the going somewhere for two weeks to try it out -- were you just living in a hotel, or was it something like an Airbnb, or how were you able to move to a place for a short term?

Mohamed Said: We used Airbnb to find a nice apartment. You mentioned that Hurghada is a luxurious city -- it's not. What you see on the Internet is the photos of the hotels and resorts, but actually the city is like a city in Egypt, and we can like it or not, but Egypt is a Third World country. It's not very clean, and not very well taken-care of, but it's definitely a nice, wild place on the sea. That's how I describe it, it's a wild place on the sea.

When we moved there for two weeks, we tried to pick an apartment at the heart of the city, not in any of the luxurious areas or places that has lots of hotels and lots of resorts, just a place in the middle of the city itself. Just to know the people, just to know how life is in the city, the actual city, not the touristic place. That was wise, wise enough for us, to understand the actual city, not just the luxurious places if we stayed in a hotel or so.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, and I didn't say Hurghada was beautiful, I said when you look up Google images, it's beautiful, and that's exactly what you pointed out, which is that there's often a difference. The interesting thing is, the more First World it is, the more likely it is that if there is natural beauty, then the cost and also the quality of the places you can live around the beautiful thing, is more necessarily higher. There's not a lot of really, really, really beautiful beaches in the U.S., maybe none, where you can live close enough to the beach that you can walk or maybe drive for five minutes and have a place that you could describe the way you just described Hurghada. Because, if there's a beach, then that means there's -- a beautiful beach, at least -- that means there's incredibly expensive ocean high rises all along the way that are really, really, really, really costly. Anybody who has got access to a beach like that is probably paying quite a premium. I visited Miami very recently, and they're extremely expensive. I'm looking at an Airbnb in Hurghada. Literally the first result that came up, studio with free private beach. It's not a beautiful place, it can fit two people, it's probably a couple hundred square foot. It's seventeen dollars per night. If you compare what that looks like to somewhere in Florida, it's kind of mind-boggling to me.

I told you before we started this call, that you have opportunity to just say, you know what, I don't want to discuss that. I'm not going to ask you how much money you're making, but I do want to ask a broader question of, does working for a U.S-based company, did that make it easier to move somewhere like Hurghada? Did that give you a little bit more financial flexibility because you're getting paid a little bit closer to American rates but living at Egyptian costs, or is the cost of living not so different that that made a big impact?

Mohamed Said: Yeah, it definitely made a huge difference, like before I started working at Laravel, the decision to move to a different city not having any friends or any family around in case I needed any kind of help, that was terrifying, but the financial security that ... It gives you a feeling of security, that's how you can describe it. That you can afford living in a place like Hurghada... Even for an Egyptian having a normal Egyptian salary, Hurghada is not very expensive. What you see in Airbnb, it's like the price or the cost for foreigners.

Matt Stauffer: Got it.

Mohamed Said: Everything has two prices, one price for foreigners and other for Egyptians.

Matt Stauffer: That's hilarious. (laughs)

Mohamed Said: That's not fair, but that's how it ...

Matt Stauffer: That's life.

Mohamed Said: Because if I have an apartment in Hurghada, and I want to rent it to someone, if I don't rent it to Egyptians and I only put prices for where foreigners can afford, Egyptians won't ever be able to rent my apartment, and it will be empty for most of the year. So, people put prices for everything, even gifts, even in the shops, they put prices in dollars or euros, or the equivalent in Egyptian pounds, dollars, and euros, but if you're an Egyptian and you go and try to buy something, they give you a different price because they know that you can't afford that high price that they give to foreigners and tourists. Yes, Hurghada is a touristic city, but that kind of separation between foreigners and Egyptians, it made it a bit easier for me to make the decision. Like the financial security that I am having from my current job, it made a big difference, I can't deny.

Matt Stauffer: You talked a little bit in one of your other interviews, and just for anybody who knows, there's two interviews that I'm referencing. He was interviewed on Laravel News podcast, and he was interviewed on the Stack Overflow blog. I'll link both of those in the show notes. Go take a look at those, because I'm not going to try and cover the same stuff that they were covering there. One of the things that you mentioned was that you had done swimming, and then your trainer pushed you a little bit too hard, and you almost had to stop swimming for a while. What was it that got you back into swimming, after you had that negative experience with it?

Mohamed Said: We used to go to the sea every summer, when I was a kid, but seven years or maybe back, my father got sick and he had problems with his business, and he had to shut it down.

Matt Stauffer: I'm sorry.

Mohamed Said: They were tough years, so we didn't get the chance to go to the sea for a few years, but then when I first got engaged to my wife, we had a trip with her family and I joined them. It was in Hurghada here in a hotel on the beach, and we just got into the sea, and I wanted to impress my fiancée. (laughs)

Matt Stauffer: That's awesome.

Mohamed Said: So I tried to swim and look cool while swimming, so that she gets impressed.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Mohamed Said: That's when I discovered that I need to get back to swimming, and I really like swimming, I really like the sea, and I need to get back to learning how to swim better. That's pretty much how that started.

Matt Stauffer: That's cool. When did you make the switch from swimming to realizing that diving was something you were interested in? What was that like?

Mohamed Said: Again, my wife was the reason, because she likes to collect seashells. I used to swim and try to dive and bring her seashells from two meters or three meters deep, and then I realized that I love diving. Because when you dive, you get closer to the fish, and get closer to the marine life, and I look cool as well.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, you sure do. That's awesome.

Mohamed Said: That's again because of my wife.

Matt Stauffer: That's very cool. I don't know what made me think about this, but I started wondering about the languages. I don't know what put that in my brain, but I assume that the common language that everyone speaks and everything -- oh, it's because you mentioned putting things in English and U.S. dollars in the windows -- is Arabic. What was learning English like for you? Was that something that you learned in school, or was it an intentional decision that you made? Do you speak English a lot better than the folks you know, or is your level of fluency pretty common?

Mohamed Said: Well, in Egypt everybody learns English in the schools. There are two types of schools, they call the New system or the Experimental system and the Old system. The Old system is Arabic only. They only learn English when they are not very young, but the school I went to, we used to have an English class since I was five or six years old. That really helped a lot. Then, later, I kept watching a lot of T.V. movies, a lot of movies and a lot of T.V. series in English, and listened to music and songs or so. That made me collect a good amount of vocabulary.

I know I have a heavy accent, and I'm not as fluent as I am while I'm writing English. I write better than speaking, because I don't get to practice English a lot. But, I think among my folks, we are all on the same level, because we all get to learn English in schools.

Matt Stauffer: That's cool. Just, for what it's worth, you don't have a heavy accent. You have an accent, but you don't have a heavy accent. Further, I think there's a difference between an accent and fluency. You are extremely fluent, there is nothing that would suggest that you're having any trouble conveying your words. That often is the difference between either a school system that introduces it really early, or someone who's taken extraordinary efforts to learn the language. So that's really cool to hear that there are schools where they're starting it so early and making it so intensive. I've spoken to a lot of people about the impact that many or most programming things being in English has, and I actually asked for a while, to people, would it be worth me building into the CMS that powers my website, the ability to have a translated version into multiple translations for each of my blog posts. Of course the people that follow me are willing to speak English, because otherwise why follow me on Twitter? So I got a little bit of a biased sample because they all said don't worry, you just need to learn English to program.

Have you seen any, or do you have any thoughts, about non-English programming education or anything like that, or are you in the camp that just says, you know what, if you're going to do code, you've got to learn English, that's just a part of the deal?

Mohamed Said: I think that if you're going to do code, you'll have to learn English. That's why I keep telling to everyone around, because the problem is, the content of the tutorials and learning content online is all in English. If you choose not to learn English just because you don't like it or you don't think it's very important, you are missing a lot. I'm not saying that people should learn the language because it's the language of the world, and so on. People have different opinions about that around the world, but if you are a programmer, and if you don't want to learn English, you are missing a lot. The number of programmers, and the number of people who have blogs and post videos online who are willing to translate their content, is not that big. So, you definitely need to learn English to have access to all this content online.

Matt Stauffer: Speaking of access to the content, I know that one of the things that impacts people's ability to learn programming, especially in our generation where there weren't a lot of resources for programming when we were a little bit younger, is when those resources and the Internet are made available in their country. I think it's a little bit more ubiquitous now than it was ten, twenty years ago. One of the things that you had mentioned was, you'd said something along the lines of, basically, when the internet became widely available in Egypt was when, I think you were twelve or thirteen or something, and you instantly latched onto Flash. You talked a little bit about your journey from Flash to HTML to PHP and WordPress, and so I don't want to double-cover that. What I'm a little more interested in, what was it like culturally to go from what was prior to that -- and I don't know what your level of access to the internet was prior -- to after that. Not even just as a programmer, but just daily life.

What was that shift like, how universal and how abrupt was the shift where you felt like you did not, and then later did, have access to the internet?

Mohamed Said: Well, before that, you just know people, just limited amount of people around you, and you only get to know other people or other thoughts or other experiences from T.V. The thing about T.V. is that it's all managed, it's not natural. You open a channel, and you see what the channel wants you to see. It was a bit limited, and you don't get to choose what idea you need to follow, you just open the T.V., and you see programs that you must watch, that's the only option you can have. You have to watch these programs in this sequence, and so on. After I got exposed to the Internet and I tested it the first time, actually the first few times I had to open the Internet, my father was there with me and I was sitting beside him, and he opened Yahoo! and told me how to search and write a search term, and how to find information ... Back then, I was interested in maybe animals, like I want to know more about giraffes, I want to know more about elephants, and so on. He taught me how to do search and how to find the information I need. I started getting into this world on my own, and tried to find things that I am interested in, and tried to learn more about it.

Back then, there was no YouTube, and not much entertainment as far as I can remember. It wasn't like a tool for entertainment like it is now. It wasn't very, very much full of the videos and the photos like before. All websites were text-based and you just get to know information about a specific topic or so, and that's how I started. But, then I knew about chatting, and I started using Yahoo! Chat, and there was a room for web designers, and I think that this room or this period of my life where I started to chat with people, it made a huge impact on who I am right now. Because when you get to meet people from outside your world or universe, like people from different countries, and they are focused on speaking about a single topic, which is web design. It's not a general chat where everybody's talking about everything, they're just a focused room full of people from different nationalities.

I was maybe thirteen or fourteen years old back then, and getting to chat with people who are much, much older than me and much more experienced, I felt like I am not very ... very amateur. I can discuss topics, and I can get into conversations, and I can have my own opinions, and that gave me a kind of confidence that I think many people, especially here in Egypt, lack. They always feel like they are not valuable enough, or not good enough to contribute or not good enough to be able to discuss a certain topic, because maybe it's their first time to ... I don't know, I can't actually explain why people think like it, but it gave me, interacting with people and speaking with them at this young age, it gave me the confidence I need.

Matt Stauffer: That's really cool to hear. Let's say, whether through you sending this to all your friends or maybe just the natural reach of this podcast, let's say we got a hundred young Egyptian women and men who are hearing you saying this, and they say, I identify with everything that Mohamed just said. I feel like I don't have anything to contribute, or I don't know how to contribute or whatever. That's not how we want them to feel. That's not how you want them to feel, that's not how I want them to feel, I know it's not how Taylor or other members of the community want them to feel. We want them to feel like they, just like anybody in any other country, whether the U.S. or anywhere else, are welcome and have something to contribute.

Is there something you could say to them, or some advice you could give to them, that would help them? That's not just for folks in Egypt, it's for anybody else in a similar country. Let's, for your sake, target people in Egypt, young people in Egypt who feel the same way that you just described. Where they just don't know how to contribute, or that they don't feel like they're good enough or whatever. Can you give them a piece of advice or say something to them, to help them move past that?

Mohamed Said: Well, I think that if you are on an online forum where people discuss web development or the area you are interested in, and you just decided or saw a post where you have an answer, or you have a reply, or you have a point of view, and you just write on your keyboard whatever you have in mind. The problem is the click on the post bottom, that's the problem. That's what's stopping everyone. Many people, I know for sure, that they see something in Laravel or any of the other repositories, and they try to contribute or ask a question or require a change or something, and they go all the way until they even open the pull request, but they just don't publish it. They just keep it, or stop at this level. So, my advice or what I want to say, just keep it out there. Nobody will judge you. Even if you have a question, and you think it's stupid, you just have to go into the forums and see how many stupid questions are out there.

I myself, I post a lot of stupid questions everywhere. The first few times, when I got hired at Laravel, I thought, I can't be an employee at Laravel and just go to the forums and ask questions about Laravel. That will make me look like I was a misfit, or it was a mistake to hire me. But then, I decided that I'll just go ahead and continue whatever I was doing, and I'll just keep posting questions, and some of these questions are really stupid. Some of them, I can really find the answer myself if I look very deep, but it's just how people are compelled to be. We are built to live together and share what we think, and just interact with each other. So, I just post it, and don't feel embarrassed or anything.

Matt Stauffer: That's really great advice, and I really appreciate you sharing that. I think it's an interesting inverse, because I think a lot of people say, well, I don't know what I'm doing, and I don't want to ask a question. But it's funny, because the more your reputation grows, actually, the more you feel you don't have the freedom to ask those questions, just like you mentioned. You felt a lot more free asking questions before you had 'first employee of Laravel' next to your name, and then all of a sudden once you do you now have, 'oh, well I gotta know these things'!

I remember when I signed a contract with O'Reilly to write Laravel: Up & Running, the first or one of the first Laravel books with a major tech publisher, I instantly had this feeling that, well, now I gotta do everything on my own, because I can't be seen asking these questions. And it's totally true. I think that not only the best learning, but even some of the best teaching to other people, requires us to start from a place of assuming that where we are is okay, and revealing that that's where we are is not going to hurt us. Because, often, you're ... Not even just learn, you're not capable of teaching something to other people until you reveal the fact that that's something that you just learned. Sometimes you're scared to teach something to someone, because what if they say, oh, duh, everybody knows that! Well, then, you don't share that thing.

So, it doesn't just limit you from learning it, it even limits you from helping other people. You mentioned that with the pull requests and stuff. I totally affirm what Mohamed just said, which is we really welcome people to be where they are, and that's okay. I think the biggest thing, if you end up going into the Larachat Slack or Laravel IRC or the GitHub issues, or anything else like that, you'll notice that people with the simplest of questions who are kind and respectful are just helped like crazy, and people with really complicated questions who are trying to show off how much they know, who are disrespectful or unkind, aren't helped so much. It's very much like, if you treat people the way you want to be treated, as long as you're kind and as long as you're respectful, I don't think there's any such thing as a bad question in that context.

Let's do a quick break before we change topics. Your Twitter handle. I have always read it as "The M Said", like "The ... M ... Said". Is that actually what it is? What is your Twitter handle and your GitHub handle actually representing?

Mohamed Said: Well, my name is Mohamed Said. When I was young, I used to have all my usernames everywhere as "m-s-a-i-d", as "msaid". Then, I don't remember what happened, but for like a year or so, I stopped being interested in the Internet and stuff and I remember closing my accounts or just ignoring them until they got deactivated on their own, and then when I came back again, I tried to register accounts from the start, and the username "msaid" wasn't available, so the second option ...

Matt Stauffer: Ah, the worst.

Mohamed Said: Yeah! So the second option was "the-M-Said", but I pronounce it as "them-said".

Matt Stauffer: That's what I was wondering. (laughs)

That was my next question, was, now that I know the source of it, how do you pronounce it? So you pronounce it like it was "them".

Mohamed Said: Yeah, "them-said". It's easier this way.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, that's funny. All right. So, again, I don't want to dig too far down this direction, but one of the things that I had mentioned to you before was that when there was a time, probably three to six months prior to when you got hired by Laravel, where you came out of nowhere. Nobody had really heard your name, at least not folks in the U.S. All of a sudden, you were making pull request after pull request after pull request, you were communicating extremely well, you were writing good code, they were extremely useful pull requests. We just kind of said, who is this guy, and where is he coming from? I remember that when Taylor started hiring for the first Laravel employee, one of the things I said was, this Mohamed guy is someone you want to take a look at. It wasn't my recommendation that got you the job or anything like that, but I definitely put a vote in your favor because I was so impressed with how useful your pull requests were, and how good your code was, and how well you were writing them.

The way I've kind of thought about it was that you were at a job, you were using Laravel, and I think it was something about collections or paginates or something where you just had a very specific set of needs, and you just ran into situations, and you kind of have the mind to say, well, it doesn't do what I want, so I'm going to write them. Do I have the right story in my head? Is that where all that came from? You basically jumped into a new code-base that was Laravel, you found missing things, and you pull-requested them?

Mohamed Said: Yeah, it was basically in the Validator, and I was working on a project where I had to do a lot of array validation, and I just discovered this tiny bug in an edge case, and I thought to myself that I can fix it, I know what went wrong, and I know how the code works internally, so I can fix it. I tried to just make the changes on my vendor's folder, just not doing anything pull requests or something, and I got it to work. I tested it on my code, and it was working. The next step, I saw that it might be useful that these changes, or these fixes that I did, to be published on Laravel so that everyone else can use them, and I just opened GitHub and read about how to open a pull request, and that's how I got my first pull request opened. It was rejected, because it was fixing something, but it was breaking another thing.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Mohamed Said: After some time, I opened another pull request maybe the next day, and that one got merged. That's how it started.

Matt Stauffer: So those pagination pull requests that you put in, that I watched happen, those weren't just your first pull requests to Laravel. They were your first open source GitHub pull requests ever?

Mohamed Said: Yeah, I never contributed to open source before. Laravel is my first project.

Matt Stauffer: All right, so there's an example of someone who had never contributed to open source before, never done a GitHub pull request before. From that to working as the first employee of Laravel within under a year if I remember correctly, and if not under a year, very close to it. There's a validation for what Mohamed was saying earlier, about just go do it, because ... Not saying that could be every person listening, but that could be!

That could potentially be, you, young listener, who has never contributed to open source, who feels like you don't have the ability to do that. That's a story that could be a part of your story, whether with Laravel or with somebody else, but you need to make that first pull request before that happens.

Mohamed Said: I would just go and say, if you have something, or if you have an opinion, if you have an idea, just don't be scared to share it. If you keep it to yourself, nobody is benefited. But if you just share it, it might be useful for someone else. Just let it out there.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, I like that. All right, so we're going to talk a little bit about your work, and your work with Laravel, and all that kind of stuff. A couple easy questions first that a few folks from Titan wanted me to ask you. The first one was, what is your editor of choice?

Mohamed Said: PhpStorm.

Matt Stauffer: All right. Did you do a transition, like a lot of folks do, where you go Sublime Text to PhpStorm, or was that just how you got started when you started writing PHP?

Mohamed Said: Well, I started writing PHP on Front Page, it was Microsoft Front Page.

Mohamed Said: Yeah. And then I moved to Dreamweaver, to Sublime, and from Sublime to NetBeans to Sublime again, and then to PhpStorm. Currently I use PhpStorm on a regular basis, but I have Sublime opened, I use it for taking screen shots, because the theme there looks cool.

Matt Stauffer: (laughs) I love it. So, what is your favorite thing about PhpStorm that makes it more useful to you than Sublime?

Mohamed Said: Well, I tried a lot of IDEs before, and I think PhpStorm is the fastest. If you are coming from a background where you are using Sublime for a lot of time, you think that PhpStorm is slow, but it's not. I think it's very fast, and it makes writing good easier with auto completion, and with the many helpers that the software has. I like it because it's fast. It is fast, compared to other IDEs. Don't compare it to Sublime but compare it to other IDEs, and you will find it very fast.

Matt Stauffer: Right. So once you've decided you're going to use an IDE, then it becomes the best option.

Mohamed Said: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: What is the most important or impactful thing you've learned from working together with Taylor?

Mohamed Said: Well, there is something that I didn't learn yet, but I wish at some point I'll start to understand how he works. Being someone like Taylor Otwell, he's very successful in what he does. He did a lot of very interesting projects helping millions of people, and the two projects or the three projects that are getting him income are very successful, and he is doing really great. But, at the same time, he didn't lose motivation. It's very amazing for me.

I feel like at some point, if I get a kind of success that I am recognized by a lot of people, and that my projects are being used by a lot of people, and I am doing very well financially, by this time, I think that I will start losing motivation in building other stuff. Like, I'll start just to relax and having something like an early retirement, but Taylor is constantly motivated to do other things. He wants to build other packages, he wants to enhance the existing packages, and he just keeps searching for ideas like new packages and how to enhance the current ones nonstop. That's something I really wish to learn.

The thing that I really admire about Taylor and that currently I think I started to learn, is how important is details. Everyone writes code, but Taylor, he doesn't only write code, he writes beautiful code. Something that when you look at, it looks nice, it looks beautiful, it looks readable. These are the details, and he is very, very focused on details as much as he is focused on the core of the thing he is building or the thing he is working on.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, that's a really great point. One of the things that we mentioned working with Taylor, working for Laravel, has allowed you to do, was it made the move to Hurghada a little bit easier. Are there other things that working with Laravel has allowed you to do, either now or maybe that you look forward to in the future, that you think you might not have been able to do had you stayed working for the company you were before?

Mohamed Said: Well, basically right now, I think, as I shared, I am most secure financially, in terms of money. But, one of the other perks that I get when I work for Laravel, is that I know a lot of people right now in different countries, so I have that plan with my wife that at some point, when we get a chance, we would love to visit a lot of countries around the world. Now I meet a lot of friends around the world, so it would be really amazing to meet all of these people in person, and get to know their life, and just not to go to the country as a tourist but knowing someone in the country gives you the chance to know the actual life of the country, not the side that tourists see. That's one thing that I find very useful.

Matt Stauffer: That's very cool. If, let's say, and God forbid, let's say for some reason, in five years, you didn't work for Laravel. For whatever reason, good or bad. What would be your dream to do, if you were spun off, you were financially stable, let's say you had some savings. Are you the sort where you would want to start a consultancy, would you want to start a product? Would you just say, you know what, I hope that I would be financially stable enough that I could just retire? Outside of the job you have right now, which is really good and I don't want to suggest you leaving or anything. Let's say there was some circumstance that led you to not be working there anymore. What would be the thing that you would pursue, or do you even have anything in mind?

Mohamed Said: Well, during the past few months I've been speaking with my wife regarding something like that. Before working at Laravel, I used to consider myself as a mid-level developer. I am not a professional developer, I never worked for a big company or a successful company. All my past employers were small start-ups or companies that have two or three developers or so. So, I always thought that my next level is to try to apply to bigger companies, and try to enhance myself and become a professional developer, or a senior-level developer, and then maybe a team leader. Just the regular ladder of web developer or programmer. But then, suddenly, I find myself working for Laravel, and I always thought that that's something I will reach when I am, maybe over my forties or something. To work for a big name as big as Laravel itself. So, it kind of made me a little bit confused for some time, that what's next for me? What's the next step?

I am twenty-eight years old, and I don't really see myself stopping working with Laravel because I love my job very much, and I love being around with all these people. Speaking with them and interacting with them, trying to help and trying to find other ways to add to the community, so on and so forth. I don't see myself leaving this job anytime soon, but the next step, which I hope will be not before at least ten years or so, I think that I am going to try a different profession. Not even programming.

The thing is, I love programming, and I've been doing it since I was very young, but moving to a city where a lot of foreigners live, I met a lot of people who just decide for like, two years, I am not going to work. I am going to live on my savings. I've met a couple of these people who just decide for a year or two, just to relax or to enjoy or to experience something different. That idea, at first, was very strange to me. If you are successful at your job and you are moving forward in your career, why would you stop and do something different in the middle of your very fruitful years? But I realized that people, when they do this, when they pause, when they get a break, when they try something different -- when they get back, they are more rich. They think of things in a different way. So, my plan is if at some point, I have to stop working for Laravel, I think that I will try to become a professional free diver.

Matt Stauffer: Tell me more about that. Is that instruction? Is it competition? What does it look like to be a professional?

Mohamed Said: Well, I think being in competitions is on the map, but I think that I still have a long way to go before I can go to competitions, because it's a very difficult sport and it requires a lot of training. For a free diver to be able to reach to the competition level, he have to be full time training, every day, for a long, long time. Not just ...

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

Mohamed Said: I go free dive once a week. That's not enough for me to reach a level where I can compete. But definitely, at some point I'd love to get certified and teach people free diving, because I like to teach people stuff. I like to see someone who is not familiar with something and I help him, and in a few months I see him doing great in the area that I try to help him with. I like that feeling, I feel like that's something that everybody likes. I think it's not something special about me. Everyone likes to see the impact of what he does on other people. I think that my next experiment would be something related to free diving. That's pretty much what it ...

Matt Stauffer: That's cool. That makes a ton of sense. I mean, a lot of us, even Taylor and Jeffrey and me and Ed, a lot of us have said, what do I want to be doing when I'm forty or when I'm fifty? Do I want to be sitting down writing code? I don't know the answer. For some folks, the answer is yes. Some folks, the answer is no. Some folks, we don't know. Jeffrey and I have often joked about being goat farmers (laughs). Someday down the road.

I think a lot of people who are programmers really focus on having ... And they have a higher focus than a lot of other people on having a physically creative hobby. A lot of them do carpentry or woodworking or whatever, because what we do is so much in the mind, it has so little actually practical, concrete application in the physical world, that sometimes we just feel like, I just want to go do something with my hands, and just see the result. Yours isn't exactly that, but it definitely is, it's a real-world, physical, tangible thing that you already love doing, that lines up with your desires of teaching, and stuff like that. I empathize with that so much. I don't live close enough to the water for that to be a thing, and I don't know that I'm as interested in free diving as you are, but the idea of being able to spend every day in the sea sounds pretty great to me. That makes a lot of sense.

I got a couple more questions, but we're nearing the end of the interview. One of the things I wanted to ask was, we've talked a little bit about some of the different aspects of what it would look like for people's confidence level of being a programmer in Egypt. We talked a little bit about how coming up into programming might have been a little bit different, coming up into open source, about how some of your international exposure through chatrooms have changed the way you see yourself and see the world a little bit. Are there any things we haven't covered where you can say, here are some factors that make it unique to be a programmer in Egypt, that are different from what you perceive from other folks in the Laravel community, that you would want to share with us?

Mohamed Said: I'm sorry, can you rephrase that question?

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, yeah. Is there anything we haven't already talked about that is an interesting way that being a programmer in Egypt is different from being a programmer elsewhere, as you kind of see from the people you know?

Mohamed Said: Well, I can pretty much say that before 2011, the programming scene in Egypt, it wasn't very fruitful. A lot of people, they favored other professions than programming, but after 2011, the Egyptian Revolution, a lot of changes in the country and one of the things that made programming pretty popular is that a lot of start-ups started in Egypt. And because there was cheap labor, like programmers in Egypt, their salaries were not as high as programmers in Europe -- a lot of companies in Europe, they started companies in Egypt to control the amount of expense they have to pay.

So, programming became one of the professions that people look forward to, and everyone is trying to become a programmer. But, then after a few years, the curve changed and the mood changed. Because of the political instability and economic instability, a lot of companies shut down and they just left, and a lot of developers who are really good, they left their country and are now working in Europe or the States. So that leaves the scene here in Egypt as if it was like the past maybe, seven or six years, weren't there. People are starting from the beginning right now.

I think that for everyone who was an Egyptian programmer who was looking forward to try to learn more and become a better programmer, I think the lessons learned from people who started early in 2010, 2011, they all have blogs online, and they have blog posts, and they talk about everything. You can just go there and read about. You will find a lot of information on these blog posts that will help you go through the journey even faster. I'm not sure that answers your question or not.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, that's a fantastic answer. Since that change has happened, where it feels like a lot of those companies, and even a lot of the more talented programmers, have left, are you in a place where you have any other programmers in town? Are there even any meet-ups that you can go to, or are you kind of getting all of your community online?

Mohamed Said: Well, that might sound depressing, but all my friends during the past seven years, everyone I ever worked with who was a developer, he already left the country.

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

Mohamed Said: I am the only one from my group of friends who are still in Egypt. It's pretty much very, very rough now. The scene right now is like how it was before that start-up movement appeared in Egypt.

Matt Stauffer: Right. That does sound a little depressing. The good thing is, you're living in that beautiful place with your wife, and getting to dive all the time. You have this great online community. I don't want to project this on you, but do you have a priority of seeing Egypt grow back in that direction, or is it like, well if it does, it does, and if it doesn't, it doesn't, and it's not too much of a bother?

Mohamed Said: Well, I have mixed thoughts about that. I wake up and I think that I want to help, I want to speak with developers in Egypt and try to... Actually, most of the developers, they don't know me, they don't know I work for Laravel. They are not on Twitter, so I am not that popular here. I wake up and I think that I want to help, I want to speak with people, I want to try to make a meet-up and teach people what I know, and try to start a community, but the next day I wake up and I think that maybe it's something good, but maybe it's not someone like me who can do that. It requires a lot of energy. Yes, a lot of energy. I see Prosper and Neo and what they are doing in Nigeria, it's incredible. These guys are heroes, they are real heroes. It takes a lot of energy for you to speak with people and gather them, and try to start a community. I'm not sure if I can do it, but I definitely help anyone who is willing to do it. I can help them in any way.

Matt Stauffer: That's cool. I really want to affirm what you just said, which is you can believe that the thing should happen, and still decide that you're not the person to do it. I feel that sometimes we feel the pressure that, well, it's not happening, and I value it, so maybe I should have to do it. I think that's a recipe for overcommitment and burnout. So, I applaud your wisdom in being able to recognize that even though you want that to happen, you are not necessarily the one who is supposed to be actually running it.

Okay, Mohamed, I have one last question for you. As somebody who watches all the issues, all the pull requests, all the documentation, everything else that come into Laravel, is there something, maybe a technical something, but maybe just how to interact with people, that you wish people would know? Is there one main thing that you say, as I watch the issues and pull requests that come into Laravel, I wish everybody knew this one thing?

Mohamed Said: I wish everybody reads the full documentation before they even start to call. A lot of people, they open issues and they try to ask questions while everything is already answered in the documentation. The thing is, people don't believe the documentation because they are used to documentation of other projects where things are not very clear, so it's easier to just ask the question on the forums or on the repository. But, for Laravel, the documentation is very, very clear. If you read the documentation, you will find a lot of gems, a lot of great stuff that you can use in your project.

I advise everyone to read the documentation from page one to the last page, and they will find themselves knowing a lot of stuff that, even if you are following Laracast, even if you already read Matt Stauffer's book, the documentation is necessary. It's important because it gets updated nearly every week with new features and even warnings about edge cases and no-fixes, things that we are unable to fix. So it's important that people should follow documentation, should read it every once in a while to make sure they are on the same page with the rest of the community.

Matt Stauffer: I like that. That's a very good one. I second that too. Not only are the docs always good, but Taylor has done several rounds of extensive review to make them better, clearer, more robust and easier to understand. There's as much work put into documentation, if not more, than into the actual code itself.

All right, so we're basically out of time, but before we go I want to ask, are there any things that you wish we had had time to cover, whether it's technical, about Laravel, or things about you that you wish people knew or just that are interesting, that we didn't have the chance to talk about?

Mohamed Said: Well, I won't feel tired for hours speaking about free diving. Maybe next time we speak on a podcast, or we meet in person, we speak about free diving a little bit more.

Matt Stauffer: It's funny, because every single podcast that I've had, I tried to stop saying it so that's why I've said it a million times, but I think in my head, I could talk about this one subject for hours! I think that several times during each of these interviews, and that was one of them. I do want to ask you one question about that. You put a lot of energy, a lot of time into free diving. Now granted, there are some easy, obvious wins. You're in the sea, it's beautiful, you're seeing ocean life and all this kind of stuff, but I want to hear from your brain, what is the main aspect of free diving that makes it so compelling to you?

Mohamed Said: The freedom. What I feel at the top, when you are not in the ocean, there are a lot of rules. You have to take care of how you look in front of people, how you speak, how you move, and sometimes how we think. But down under when you are into the sea, you go blank. Your mind just stop thinking, and you enjoy the freedom that you can. You don't care how you look, you don't care how you move. Even if you are swimming wrong, no one will be there to judge or tell you that you are wrong, and you can pretty much do whatever you want. There's something I really do, if I am upset or I am mad, or I don't feel quite happy. When I dive, I just go down there, maybe ten meters down, and I scream. I let it all out, until there is no air in my lungs any more, and that's the time I come up, but that feeling of being able to do whatever you want, it's freedom. That's the most incredible thing I love about free diving.

Matt Stauffer: That's amazing. I'm really glad we at least went five minutes in, because like I said, I agree with you, I'd love to go for hours like that, but I don't know if I would have even begun to understand that that is a part of it because you mention that, and I've never done free diving but I've swum in the ocean, and I remember one time I went lobster hunting and it was just me, digging around and diving around, and you're right, I had no thoughts whatsoever about other people looking at me, or my gait, or my dress, or my anything. Pure focus was on what was around me. You're really right to point that there's not a lot of contexts where that's the case. I think it's probably true at least a little bit anytime we're out in nature, it's one of the reasons why people love mountains and oceans and stuff. That's really fascinating. Thanks for sharing that.

Mohamed Said: Yeah, I love it so much. I'd keep speaking about it for hours.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, next time we will do that.

Mohamed Said: Okay.

Matt Stauffer: So, if people are going to follow you, you are on Medium, you are on GitHub, you are on website, on Twitter, and GitHub, and they're all basically, you said, "them-said" is how you say it. So, "t-h-e-m-s-a-i-d", and pretty much on all those contexts you're there. Are there any other ways people should follow you, or any other projects or anything that you want to shout out?

Mohamed Said: Well I am on Twitter, and I like to speak with people, I like to get to know people, so just drop me a line and I'd love to speak with you on any topic. That's the message I want to tell everyone.

Matt Stauffer: I love it, that's great. Well, I could talk for hours, but we're definitely hitting time now, so ... Mohamed, thank you so much. Thank you for your time today, thank you for sharing all this stuff with us, thank you for the hard work you put in for the Laravel community. Not just as work, but as your love for helping and teaching people, thank you for contributing that and for being a part of making the Laravel community a better place.

Mohamed Said: Thank you Matt for having me, and thank you for this season three of the podcast. I've heard the past three episodes, and they were really amazing. The questions you ask and how people answer, it makes you get to know people themselves, not people as programmers, the persons. So, thank you for this.

Matt Stauffer: Well, I'm overjoyed to hear that, and I look forward to hearing when everybody gets to learn about you as well. Mohamed, thank you, it was great talking to you, and I'll talk to you later.

Mohamed Said: See you later, Matt.

]]>
Fri, 27 Oct 2017 13:49:00 +0000matt@mattstauffer.co (Matt Stauffer)Matt Stauffer01:04:58An interview with Mohamed Said, Laravel's first employee.
An interview with Mohamed Said, Laravel's first employee.
nofull53Interview: J.T. Grimes, lover of puppies and shaver of ungulates65b75e18-676f-4c7e-8742-0f8929cf93d8http://www.laravelpodcast.com/74f05992
An interview with Laravel woman-around-town and lover of puppies J.T. Grimes.
An interview with Laravel woman around town and lover of puppies J.T. Grimes.

Matt Stauffer: Welcome to the third interview of Laravel Podcast, season three. We're going to be talking to J.T. Grimes who has been around the Laravel community and is one of the funniest people in Laravel, but you might not know much about her. Stay tuned.

We're going to get started. It's the next episode. This is the third interview of Laravel Podcast season three, so the first one was Taylor Otwell, so Taylor who everyone knows he created Laravel. The second was introducing Neo who a lot of people don't know but within his world he's extremely well-known, so within the Laravel, Nigeria world everyone knows who Neo is. It was kind of a fun little world, way for them to join in to maybe I don't know if the American or whatever space. m This next interview is very interesting and I very intentionally not told anybody who I'm talking to, which is tough because what I wanted to do was go out in Twitter and say, "Hey, who has questions for this person?" But I decided intentionally to wait because I think that this is going to be such a treat for someone who is everywhere but nobody knows anything about her.

The interview today is with J.T. Grimes and I actually need to pull up your Twitter profile because one of the things about your Twitter profile, is it a South Park character?

J.T. Grimes: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: Almost everybody who interacts with you doesn't even know you look like. The Golden State, we got some Cal going on there, there's South Park, but you're one of those folks like you and Amanda Folsom like nobody unless you've been to a Lericon Conference and had the pleasure of interact with J.T. don't actually know. I guess like at Sunshine PHP or something like, you're actually know what J.T. looks like, but are you wearing the hat right now?

J.T. Grimes: My hair wants to do this Alfalfa thing all the time, and it's either be seen in public like that or wear a hat-

Matt Stauffer: Got it. Got it.

J.T. Grimes:... so always the hat.

Matt Stauffer: I like it. J.T., can you tell people, say hi to people and tell them who are you in whatever length you want to say, and where do you work and what do you do and what brings you exposure to the Laravel community?

J.T. Grimes: I was frankly a little surprised that you wanted to talk to me because I don't see myself as being one of the "She's everywhere" community members. I work for a little insurance company in San Francisco, I've been in the same job for 21 years.

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

J.T. Grimes: Well the same company. Longer than some of your listeners have been alive.

Matt Stauffer: It's true.

J.T. Grimes: I never wanted to be a programmer, I was very clear that that was not going to be the direction my life was going in. My mother is a programmer and so I spent all of my teenage years saying, "I'm not going to be like her." I went to school with a degree in Statistics, got a job as an actuary or an actuary trainee.

Every job I had they kept trying to make me progress. I kept saying no, no this is so me.

Matt Stauffer: The universe.

J.T. Grimes: Finally I just had to give in.

Matt Stauffer: Actually, I need to pause and do one thing. I said I was going to do this, getting like totally failed. I'm looking at you and I'm seeing a microphone sitting in front your face and that microphone arrived too because Twilio the people at Twilio.com are amazing human beings and they have sponsored us getting good recording equipment to anybody who doesn't have it.

I want to say, Twilio, if you need text messages or voicemails or anything like that programmatically Twilio are the bomb, they're freaking amazing people. Greg Baugues is the man so as Ricky, and they sent us stuff over. Okay, thank you, Twilio. We love you, you're great. Okay, now back to my question. When they got you in?

J.T. Grimes: Yeah. When you work in insurance and you're in all the economy kind of company you are still sending faxes.

Matt Stauffer: Got it, so you actually love, you are using them on a regular then?

J.T. Grimes: Oh yeah.

Matt Stauffer: Oh man. Good, Twilio. They finally convince you, you're an actuary, you're doing the very, very exciting. Is that like I mean, is it Excel? Are using Excel is an actuary or is there a like more complicated stuff?

J.T. Grimes: I know that there are companies who use more complicated stuff. I've always been an Excel user, but it being a data monkey, it comes with data coming in a little bit of analysis going out.

Matt Stauffer: I'll ask you more in a second now that you're doing programming there. Originally, when you were first doing that before they can convince you go to programming, was it basically Excel and Access and Spreadsheets and numbers like that?

J.T. Grimes: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: Adam often I forget his exact same term would be, basically says like, "What we're doing is all basically just like Excel." He may say it in the inverse anything you could do in programming you do in excel something like that. It seems like a pretty reasonable transition to me and I got to say there's not a lot of people who are, I don't want to say anything about generations but there's not a lot of people who are at least in my generation whose parents are programmers because it's not ... What kind of programming was your mom doing?

J.T. Grimes: She started doing Fortran.

Matt Stauffer: Okay, that's pretty good.

J.T. Grimes: For a local oil company in the late 60s, switched to COBOL and was at Bank of America and a couple of other banks for 40 years.

Matt Stauffer: Wow, okay so that's how she got in. When they finally convinced you to be a programmer? What was the task or what was the language? Tell me more about that first time.

J.T. Grimes: There were a lot of Excel macros, there was a lot of ... This isn't really programming but I'll just write a program to do this.

Matt Stauffer: Got it.

J.T. Grimes: There was the first thing I used in a professional capacity was Delphi one. Delphi was visual Pascal the one language Microsoft has never given us the visual version of.

Matt Stauffer: Wait a minute. Can I pause you? I know that Visual Basic is the thing, I know that there is visuals. I don't actually know what a visual version of a language is, can you tell me what that means?

J.T. Grimes: Generally, when Microsoft uses it, it means that it is designed to build native apps on those.

Matt Stauffer: Okay, got it.

J.T. Grimes: Visual Basic gives you the tools to make your Windows Forms in all of your screens.

Matt Stauffer: But using a programming, so visual means this programming language is meant to build native user interface on it versus whatever else?

J.T. Grimes: Right.

Matt Stauffer: Okay, so sorry I interrupted you were talking about Pascal and Delphi, a whole bunch of words that I don't understand so I got it like [inaudible 00:06:49] one by one.

J.T. Grimes: Pascal is a C like language but very verbose instead of brackets you have begin and end and everything is words instead of symbols, but you've still got pointers, you can still do all the things you can do in C. There was a little bit of Visual Basic, there was a little bit of Perl as little as I could manage. I figured out real quick that if Perl was what it took to be a programmer in this new exciting Internet age it was not for me.

Matt Stauffer: How were you learning at this point? What resources were you using to learn these languages?

J.T. Grimes: With Delphi, it was books, there may have been a CompuServe forum. Yes, I'm old enough to have used CompuServe forums, but we actually had printed pieces of paper and we would pile them up on our desks, and sometimes we'd use them to lift monitors up as well.

Matt Stauffer: I assume you're referencing books when you talk about printed pieces of paper.

J.T. Grimes: I think that's what they're called.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, books. Am I allowed to ask? I'm not asking anything about age but just at this moment when you were learning to code and you're at it totally non-determined age, what time period was that because it's CompuServe, so this is early '90s or ...?

J.T. Grimes: It would have been the mid '90s.

Matt Stauffer: Okay, mid '90s. All right.

J.T. Grimes: I mean I've said I've been at my current job for 21 years so I'm sure knowing that.

Matt Stauffer: Hey, I'm not, okay so that part makes a little more sense. Yeah, okay, cool. All right, so you were pre-internet teaching yourself the code. I mean a lot of people's stories Neo stories and Taylor story and my story, we're talking about teaching ourselves the code by viewing source on websites.

A lot of us didn't get into anything until we got it a PHP and that's how we got into like, whatever. You're teaching yourself A) pre-internet and B) you're teaching yourself like some, I don't know what the term is, it's not hard code but like this is legitimate programming stuff and you're just kind of hacking it through as you went. Did those books really help you or is it a little more just kind of trial and error?

J.T. Grimes: There's a lot of trial and error, there is a lot of ... let me try and build a program that does this and learn just enough to do it-

Matt Stauffer: Got it.

J.T. Grimes:... which is how-

Matt Stauffer: Everyone is right.

J.T. Grimes: I think everyone has learned for the last 30 years. Just like always, there were a couple of authors and a couple of imprints that were very reliable. This was before O'Reilly had different animals on the coverage of everything. I'm not sure they were even a thing.

Matt Stauffer: Do you remember anybody who really kind of stood out as a helpful resource then?

J.T. Grimes: Marco Cantu was the guy's name who wrote the best Delphi books, and I can't believe I just pull that name out of my head. That is a brain shell that could have done something useful, but instead-

Matt Stauffer: It prepared for this moment right now.

J.T. Grimes: Marco Cantu. Exactly.

Matt Stauffer: That was we're talking about mid '90s. You learned all those languages, but that's not where you're writing today. What was the next step ... Well actually I don't know. I mean, I assume that because I met you at Lericon and because you basically joke on the whole Laravel community a little bit at a time, that you're writing in at least some pitch piece and web based stuff today, but there's got to be some things that happened between that moment 20 years ago and where you are today.

What kind of transitions did you go through? I mean you're staying in the same job, they weren't job transitions, or at least they weren't company transitions. What was next after you started learning?

J.T. Grimes: I work for an insurance company and one of the things you have to do is read different kinds of policies. We have algorithms that are built to do the reading. It's a frame building with this kind of roof and this like square footage and, oh you're running a music studio so there are kids in there all the time, so your liability charts goes way up.

Somebody has to get all those algorithms into the system, so it's not really programming in a language but it's building algorithms and it's functionally programming. The system we've got to do this in is really cool, I would love to show it off some time but it is in COBOL.

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

J.T. Grimes: The back end at my insurance company is COBOL, we've got four or five COBOL programmers who are great, who are some of the best programmers I've worked with, which always surprises people.

Matt Stauffer: You're saying is not was. You're talking about today.

J.T. Grimes: I'm talking about today. The system we're on when life in, I want to say 1990 or '91 and has been in continuous operations since then. There's active development going on along with maintenance. Most of the system has been rewritten in those 25 years, but yeah we were running the same thing, have been running the same thing in COBOL 25 years. It's solid.

Matt Stauffer: That's amazing. I've got so many things to ask you but I got to pause you, you're talking about a system running longer than almost anybody listening. Some of them have not even in the life that long. That's silliness aside, I would say there's a very, very, very tiny percentage of people who have been programming as long as that system has been running.

You know what things were are fads now. You know the limitations of Laravel, and I want to keep getting back to your story in a minute but I got to stop you there. What could you point to if anything well you say, "You know what that is something that I can learn from this nearly 30 year running code base that we could kind of benefit from today," like what are some of the things that have helped that be so stable? Is it because of COBOL, is because there are great programmers, are there any things systems are structured or practices or attitudes that you could share with us?

J.T. Grimes: So the tooling that's in place is terrible. It's awful. We don't have source control.

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

J.T. Grimes: We don't have a staging server, there is Dev which works as test and there's production because we're running on a mainframe and you can't exactly get a mainframe at everyone's desk.

Matt Stauffer: Oh my gosh.

J.T. Grimes: There is no virtual machine that emulate an IBM, I think Power I is what they're currently calling the product but basically one of IBM's mainframes. So much of the tooling in the system that's in place is awful, and the only reason that I can think of but we're still running and I need to knock wood because if I did shit someone will kill me. Is that we've had really exceptional people, but beyond that I was looking at our system and I thought, "Here's a great conference talk. If I were not painfully shy and unable to speak in front of people." We, as a financial services kind of thing need to be able to roll back transactions do things out of order, keep track of rebuild the policy from scratch.

This is really cool and I don't know anyone who's doing this in PHP and just as I was thinking that, I can't remember what you call it now, CQRS.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, the event sourcing and the command query in response to separation and all that stuff.

J.T. Grimes: Event sourcing became a new hotness, and essentially what this is. is event sourcing that we've been doing in COBOL for 30 years. The database design has been super solid if I were going to give people one piece of advice that goes against everything you hear now, get your database design down first.

It is the most important part of your system, whatever you're showing, whatever you're making, 90% of it, if you're using Laravel probably 98% of the products you're making are crowd apps. You are reading data and you are writing data, and if the database isn't right you're going to be in a world of hurt.

Matt Stauffer: That's really helpful, and I'm going to dig down there a little further, I think that's a great advice from you. I would say, if you've got these really kind of pro programmers that you're working around every single day, get the database right, I mean that's a huge thing. I would say like there's people who have taught me various things like I can look to one person who taught me about simplicity, and I can look to another person who taught me about denormalizing databases, various things that they taught me.

When you think about the people in your team who you're so impressed with, are there any specific things where even if they're not sure, well you can say, "You know what, like by working with this person they really made me better at this or at that."

J.T. Grimes: I can't think of a specific thing that they've made me better at, but I can tell you that working with them has made me better. I've gotten a lot better at communicating because we don't, once we are on our machines we don't speak the same language at all.

We have variables and we have loops and we have, we're accessing the same data, but we have very different terminology for it, and so being able to bridge that has been a really useful skill.

Matt Stauffer: Where are your various code base is talking together? Is there shared databases that they're interacting with? Or how are they actually connecting to each other?

J.T. Grimes: The main system, the source of all truth is the COBOL, the I series, the Db2 database that's running on there. The AS/400 or the I series who's IBM's current marketing term for it, and when you've been using the same thing for 30 years you call it by its 30-year-old name it happens. It is the source of truth, we have web apps on other servers, public face and servers that talk to it through essentially a homemade API.

PHP is one of the only modern languages that runs smoothly on IBM set up, and that's because they've done it partnership with Zend, Zend actually makes an interpreter specifically for running on IBM's mainframes.

Matt Stauffer: That's fascinating. I had no idea.

J.T. Grimes: ZendCon is coming up. If you're going check out the I series though usually have a day of sessions that are specifically about running PHP on IBM hardware. It's a very different group from who you find in the other sessions, they tend to be in those same sessions together the whole time because your company is paying for you to go learn this one thing that you cannot learn anywhere else.

Matt Stauffer: Anywhere else. That's fascinating, because there's just a small subset of people who are actually doing that extremely vital PHP on IBM kind of thing then right?

J.T. Grimes: I think so, but it's one of those invisible communities. There are a lot of them out there, but people who aren't doing cutting edge stuff who aren't at startups are probably the bigger part of the PHP communities for folks working for the government, for bank, for anywhere else that's boring.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, well it's so interesting because I hear you say that and I go, "Yeah, I know those people are out there," but again I met you at Lericon and the first thing that doesn't come to my mind is people who are working on applications that have been running for 30 years who you talk about the boring stuff.

Even ZendCon, I mean ZendCon like I went to ZendCon a year or two ago, and one of the reasons was because they're really trying to reach out to the non-Zend world, because like I think even just not even talking about PHP on IBM people, I'm just talking about Zend in general, it tends to be relatively disconnected from like the Laravel of the world.

You're talking even a further thing within the Zend world. There's this even much smaller subset of people who are the Zend and IBM. This is like a really, I don't want to say it's a niche because I don't know how small it is, but how on earth? You know what, I've got so many questions I was about to ask how they put, I'm jumping ahead of myself. Let's step back a second.

Are there any big transitions in the work you're doing between when you first got started, when you first were doing all that kind of work when you were learning COBOL and you're learning the visual stuff Pascal and all that, and what you're doing today because obviously today you're doing at least some web, you're doing some PHP. What was that transition like? How did it take from you to go from there to here?

J.T. Grimes: I'm going to correct two things. One, I don't do COBOL.

Matt Stauffer: Okay, sorry, I was mixing up all my old language.

J.T. Grimes: I understand. I actually advocate for people to learn COBOL, all the COBOL programmers want to retire and there's no one to fill in for them.

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

J.T. Grimes: You would be surprised at how many financial institutions, other big companies are still running COBOL, and they're doing it for the same reason that my company is, which is two-fold. One, it's incredibly expensive to rewrite everything you've got. Two, once it's been in production for 10, 20, 30 years, it's effectively been tested every way possible.

The risk of going to something new, I think Visa still using COBOL. If you are the largest payment processor in the world the risk of rolling out a new system is-

Matt Stauffer: Is not worth it.

J.T. Grimes:... is mind boggling.

Matt Stauffer: You'd rather use a 30-year-old system and keep paying for those old mainframes, and then paying enough money obviously for IBM to keep producing them and for Zend to keep doing those integrations. That's pretty incredible because when you say COBOL like I hear people say, I learn a [inaudible 00:20:41] COBOL and I'm like, "Yeah, 30 years ago. I don't think about today."

J.T. Grimes: The jobs were out there, the need is out there because ... and it's not just maintenance, some companies are still doing new development. Mostly it's maintenance but-

Matt Stauffer: But we're not talking maintenance at the level of like, "Oh just fix this thing a little bit until we replace it." We're talking about long term maintenance as long as they can keep running on the system kind of maintenance.

J.T. Grimes: Well, one of the really big differences about being an enterprise and I'm making air quote when I see that, developer as opposed to somebody who's working for a startup or an agency is that your time horizons are drastically different. We are not looking for something that will keep us going until we get profitable. We have been profitable for 150 years off and on.

Matt Stauffer: Geez.

J.T. Grimes: The other thing when we talk about rewriting the system is, "Okay, this can be a five to 10-year process. What technology stack would you want to build on that will still be useful, available, not archaic in 10 years?"

Five years ago, I would have said, Java, thank goodness we didn't do that but with things changing as quickly as they are it makes it really hard to plan for the long term and much easier to stand pat.

Matt Stauffer: It's really interesting. One of the things that we've talked about often and like the Laravel Podcast is that, there's often conflicts between the Laravel world and various people who have a very, very distinctly different mindset, just within the PHP community. I think one of the helpful things that we came to over time is, you know what we're noticing that the differences often are less about people who have different opinions about the way the world should work, because they are different people and it's more because they're in different contexts.

I can look at event sourcing for a start-up and you can look at event sourcing for a financial institution, and we can come to a different conclusion about whether or not event sourcing is a wise decision for the products we're working on. If we don't recognize it, it's because we're in a different context we could say, "Well, you like it and it's wasting time," and well you don't like it because you know it's like, "Oh no we just have different needs."

Again, in that those conversations first of all it's helpful to recognize that but second of all, we're usually still only talking about web applications built by PHP developers in frameworks written in the last five years. This is so many steps beyond that, that it's just fascinating to me how far out it is. Before I step to my next thing you watch all this happen on Twitter. You are involved in your lobbying, I mean you in yes are two of the funniest people I've ever met in my entire life especially the way you guys interact on Twitter.

Do you look at the online conversations of the Laravel crew? Do you look at the Laravel podcast? Do you look at stuff that happens? Do you have anything to share with us? Did you have any outside perspective where we say, "You know what, don't worry about this or focus more on this, or man you all could learn this," or anything like that.

J.T. Grimes: I see a lot of people who I think are talking past each other because of what you just said the different contexts. If you're doing Greenfield totally new development, you're going to have a very different set of goals than somebody who's got a system that's been in production for its PHP, so a couple of years, which in PHP sounds like a long time.

You're looking at different things. You have a really different experience in terms of maintenance. A question I've taken asking in interviews is, what's the oldest code base you've worked on? What's the longest you've had to maintain a section of code? If you can find somebody who's got a couple of years in, grab them they actually have experience doing maintenance. The other thing is, I am older than a lot of the Laravel community, I have been in the same job for 20 years.

My perceptions of other people are going to be colored by that, but it looks to me like the kids today and I take credit for bringing the phrase, "Get off my lawn at Laravel community," but you kids today switch jobs every 18 months, every two years. There isn't that I've been working on the same code base for a long enough to have really absorbed it and taken it all in, and the ownership not just the ownership the experience with it that you get after working at the same place in the same code for a long time is very different from what you get when you're changing often.

Matt Stauffer: That's really, really interesting and if I were someone who was a mid-level developer and I maybe been in my job for the last 18 months, do you have one piece of advice just in this little kind of concept that you're talking about in terms of experience with the code base. Is there one good way I could act on what you just shared with me?

J.T. Grimes: It's been a long time since I looked for a job, I only know what I'm looking for not what other hiring managers are looking for.

Matt Stauffer: Well, let's say maybe not even about switching jobs, would you say ... because one of the things that I took away from what you just said was, maybe consider sticking around a little longer but I don't know if you're actually saying that. Are you?

J.T. Grimes: I don't know if I'm saying that either.

Matt Stauffer: Okay.

J.T. Grimes: For me, a lot of the job satisfaction and I think a lot of the skill that I bring is having really deep business knowledge, knowing all of the contacts. I have worked in insurance longer than I've been a programmer. I know this stuff often better than the users who are giving specs to us. Having that really good context for everything, it sort of it lets me know I'm building the thing that user needs not with the thing the user asked for.

I wonder how much people get of that when they're changing jobs often. I think that there is a different kind of job satisfaction you can get from staying with a project for a long time.

Matt Stauffer: That's really, really cool. That's really helpful to hear. I've found that I started seeing this a lot in the podcast, but I could talk about this for an hour but let's move on to something else. I was wrong about COBOL, you're not writing COBOL but that was fascinating where we just went down.

When did you start doing web based stuff and what does a web based applications look like? Is it facing the customers of the insurance agency and giving them access to data that they previously would have called in for? What kind of stuff do you build there?

J.T. Grimes: There's both internal applications and external phasing ones, and what we do is we access either the database or we actually run COBOL programs calling them from PHP. I know I'm not the only person doing this because somebody else built tools to do it, but it feels like that's an easiest thing there is out there.

It's one of those things where there are, there's just a very small community of people who you can ask questions of and who know about this stuff. On the one hand, when you run into trouble you'd know who the people are to talk to. On the other hand, when you run into trouble you may literally be the first person to have this.

Matt Stauffer: You're not going to stack overflow. How do you even know the folks to talk to about this?

J.T. Grimes: I met one of them at Gen Con while he was presenting on the IBM and I stuff, and the single thing, probably the most valuable thing I've ever gotten out of the conference was having breakfast with this guy. I've still got three pages of note from that. Alan [Shaiden 00:29:15] is his name and if anyone else is doing Laravel on the IBM I series, A) hit me up but B) hit up Alan for anything about the I series.

Matt Stauffer: All right, so you're not just doing web applications, you're actually using Laravel, so how on earth when you're in this kind of enterprise, a kind of old school system, how you just stumble across Laravel and what attracted you to it versus the other options available to you?

J.T. Grimes: I had used CodeIgniter before, and CodeIgniter, the single best thing about it was that if you had a question you could find an answer, either in the docs or in the forums, but somebody knew what needed doing if you had a problem.

I also used once or twice a framework called Qcodo, which has since died a very quiet, but the guy who wrote it was a Delphi developer before he got into PHP. The way everything was set up was very familiar to me. You built your web forums in a very sort of Microsoft a Visual Studio kind of way where you said, "Okay, put in a select box here and put a label on it here."

It was familiar to me but it was also not the documentation wasn't great and development had clearly slowed down on it by the time I needed something for the last project. I was fiddling with CodeIgniter and it didn't feel good anymore and the way it had when I started with it. I started browsing around what other frameworks are out there, oh this guy is trying this new thing called Laravel and it's on version three.

It stuck around for at least three months give it a try. It took a surprisingly long time for Laravel to click for me because I was so used to other frameworks and other ways of doing things, but once it did I found it was just easy to get the stuff that I needed done. Aside from reading the database on Db2 on the IBM mainframe. Even that we've got like now we're actually using Laravel's query builder with a couple of little custom things thrown in to access the database.

Matt Stauffer: Wait a minute. Is it the query builder and it's heading like the actual database connection system, or are you using something, are you like layering the query builder on top of a non-database seeking system? How does that actually work?

J.T. Grimes: Laravel's query builder wants to connect through PDO and while in theory, you can use PDO to talk to a Db2 system. I've never gotten that to work.

Matt Stauffer: Got it.

J.T. Grimes: But PHP has built in, thanks to Zend and IBM in their thing, and Db2 function is the same as the old MySQL functions that nobody should be using anymore. What I did was I made basically a connection class that simulated being PDO but was actually calling all the Db2 functions underneath.

Matt Stauffer: That's fascinating.

J.T. Grimes: You end up being able to use Laravel's query builder, you can use eloquent in theory I haven't actually describe that.

Matt Stauffer: Those are my next questions.

J.T. Grimes: But there's no reason it couldn't. The only reason I don't use eloquent on the mainframe is that the tool we used to generate COBOL has some very interesting opinions and conventions around it, and none of the file names or table names are useful or readable so they all have to be translated to something else anyhow.

Matt Stauffer: Got it, yeah, so at that point trying to force kind of eloquent has opinions and that tool has opinions and reconcile their opinions just doesn't really seem worth it when you could just use that query builder.

J.T. Grimes: Exactly.

Matt Stauffer: That's cool. You're building applications, so your day-to-day transitioning between a 30-year stable system, on a mainframe to one of the most modern PHP frameworks that there is with just testing and TDD and migrations and sitting at stuff like that, do you feel the burden of a lot of contact switching, or is it all connect together in your brain?

J.T. Grimes: Most of it connects together in my brain. The places where I run into problems are where I just don't have the tooling that I want. I don't have access to multiple IBM I series. I can't just spin up a new database, spin up a new instance. I wanted to test my interaction with a program, I need to be very careful to make sure that I am not hitting production data and it's with my setup way easier than it should be.

I spend way too much of my time building safeguards for no, no, you don't mean that.

Matt Stauffer: That's interesting because we talk often about how a lot of things that have to do with type hinting and a lot of these other things are, well I don't trust the other developers. The stranglehold that you're not allowing developers to do things because you don't trust them. It's interesting because what you're talking about is really well I don't trust myself to not accidentally touch something that would basically lose me a lot of other people their jobs if I completely destroyed everything.

What sort of things are you finding yourself reaching for for those safeguards? Is it easy to share some of those?

J.T. Grimes: I find myself hard coding addresses to our test system it's like, if you want to hit production on this it's not just changing an environment variable, it's not just telling it, "Oh, we're in staging now, go ahead and hit the staging server." Everything is hard coded to the wrong server until it's time to move it to the right one.

Matt Stauffer: That's fascinating. It makes sense, totally though. Until you know the thing is not going to break things, make it like you have to be very explicit and intentional to actually even touch that thing that you don't want to broke in.

J.T. Grimes: Yeah, we have a lock on the door to the server room for a reason. This is my server room lock. We have a server room, we have physical hardware it's very exciting.

Matt Stauffer: In terms of testing, do you do much of your Laravel code? And if you do, what is it look like to simulate the data that's coming back? Or are you using real data from the staging server? How does that kind of work in your testing?

J.T. Grimes: I dreamt of my test and bandwagon a couple of years ago. It has not been that long, it's been longer than for some people. Everybody kind of has this one moment where it clicks in for them. For me, there's a guy named and I'm going to scrape his name, Juan Trimenio, and he wrote a couple of articles on using PHP unit, many got bored and started going off and doing puppet things.

Oh that's really cool too, but these three or four articles he wrote are what absolutely clicked for me. Thank you if you're listening. It was what got me to slowly start writing more tests. Once I did that, I found that I was much more confident pushing new code and making new changes because I could tell if I'd broken something.

If I broke something and I didn't know then I just wrote a test for it, and now the next time I know. The value became clear. As soon as I thought I was ready to put the code in production and then said, "Oh, I just need to change one little thing and everything blew up." Oh thank goodness, I have these tests.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, the first time a test catches you and you're not, you haven't yet internalized the value that is coming from it. It's like a, I don't know it's like a breath. I don't even know it, it's not a breath of fresh air. It's this amazing moment though.

J.T. Grimes: It's magic.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, it's exactly what it feels like you're like, I never had this, this, the responsibility for this thing that breaking always lived in my brain and my shoulders and my stress, and all of a sudden this just magical little creature just came and told me with a little red axe, you just screwed it up. It's really an amazing experience.

J.T. Grimes: Finding out that I broke stuff before it hit production was the best thing ever.

Matt Stauffer: That's cool. I like that. Okay, so once again, I'm going to talk to you about this for another hour. I'm going to move on. I've got a couple random questions we could talk a little bit more about code and architecture infrastructure, but I want to make sure that we have time to talk about J.T. stuff. You are a shaver of an ungulates. I assume that that is somehow refers to dogs but I intentionally didn't Google it beforehand. What is an ungulate? How do you see it?

Matt Stauffer: Oh, I was going to say hoofed. No, okay, your yak shaver. That was an incredibly indirect developer joke way to go. All right, yak shaving, got it. Yak shaving and bikeshedding. Do you bike?

J.T. Grimes: I do not. I feel so alone.

Matt Stauffer: Because you live in the Bay Area and you don't bike at all?

J.T. Grimes: Well I'm part of the PHP community, we don't bike at all.

Matt Stauffer: Are you Oakland for life?

J.T. Grimes: I am a third generation Oaklander.

Matt Stauffer: Wow, that's amazing. I know very little bit about Oakland. Basically my knowledge is I, what was that show that was sent, I think it was sent in Oak, wasn't it?

J.T. Grimes: Was it [Shansvanerky 00:39:08]? Was it here?

Matt Stauffer: No. Anyway, wherever it was, it was sent some beautiful Bay Area that seemed very rustic but honestly it was probably a multimillion dollar house. I visited Oakland a tiny little bit and I understand the concept of it being kind of like the less quickly gentrifying kind of across the bay cousin of San Francisco. What do you love and hate most about Oakland?

J.T. Grimes: What I hate most is that, it's gentrifying much more quickly here. You don't run into that many people from Oakland who are in Oakland, who are from Oakland.

Matt Stauffer: Really? That quickly.

J.T. Grimes: Yeah. The houses here, the prices have shot from reasonable to insane. There's a lot for sale in my neighborhood and it's people have lived in the neighborhood for a long time who just can't afford not to sell because it's so much money.

Matt Stauffer: Right, it's not even the property taxes, it's just when you look at your finances and selling your house could basically pay off your debt or whatever else, you can afford to stay there anymore.

J.T. Grimes: Well, I've told my boss a couple of times and they really don't like hearing it. I could sell my house and retire. I couldn't move to Reno and find a crummy little apartment for 400 bucks a month and live up.

Matt Stauffer: Never work a day to get a new life.

J.T. Grimes: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: Wow. Go ahead.

J.T. Grimes: To me that's just insane.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, it makes sense. We all understand why it's gentrifying it's across the way from San Francisco, you got the gentrifying wedge of hipsters and artists who wanted to come in to the rundown place or whatever. Additionally, it's relatively close access and the more it gentrifies the more people feel comfortable stepping in there. Oakland has more going for just than being across the way from San Francisco. What do you love the most about Oakland?

J.T. Grimes: It's home. The weather is great. The people are neat. I was going off on a rant and I can do a half hour on how great the Bay Area is. Any time you need that. One thing is that, it's a port city, and port city have so much more interaction with the rest of the world and have since they were founded. In the 1850s, there were days when San Francisco had more Russian fur traders than actual San Franciscans because folks would hit the port and go to town.

You end up with communities that are really tolerant of differences who are just used to, you're not like me but that's fine. That is just a wonderful thing if you are like me.

Matt Stauffer: Let's talk about like you. If someone had never met you before how would you describe yourself? I know this is something I usually start off with, but what are you about?

J.T. Grimes: I'm smart and I'm funny and I like cute things.

Matt Stauffer: I can attest to all these things having known you for so many years. Why are you so funny? Do you ever like do comedy or that is your family really funny or does that come from any source other than just your personality?

J.T. Grimes: Oh no, it's deep internalized pain.

Matt Stauffer: Fair. I believe it.

J.T. Grimes: You'll never find anyone who's funny who is not just suffering inside.

Matt Stauffer: That was one of the most truest ones, that is so incredibly true. Is that something you've just discovered, or is that something people talk about that? Is that a commonly known thing?

J.T. Grimes: I think it's a commonly known thing if you pay attention to it.

Matt Stauffer: Got it.

J.T. Grimes: Most comics are fairly upfront about that this doesn't come from a place of knock knock joke. Knock knock jokes are just fun. You can't make a living with those, you can't make a living exposing yourself to people with your pain, giving them something that they can relate to from their own lives because nobody's life is easy. It would be great if they were, but everybody's got something.

J.T. Grimes: Puppies are awesome, puppies are everything that is good in the world. As a teenager, I decided that we could have world peace if we could just make leaders of nations negotiate treaties in a room full of Labrador puppies, and I still believe this is true.

Matt Stauffer: I love it.

J.T. Grimes: It's really ...

Matt Stauffer: Go ahead.

J.T. Grimes: It's really hard to plant bomb someone or to screw them in a trade deal when there's a cute little fluffy Labrador trying to nibble on your ear. It's just not going to happen.

Matt Stauffer: All right. How many dogs do you have?

J.T. Grimes: I just have one.

Matt Stauffer: Oh, just one. I figured there's like five run around all a time.

J.T. Grimes: Nope, he's a grumpy old man who will not share.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, he would not put up with anybody else infringing his territory.

J.T. Grimes: No.

Matt Stauffer: That's awesome. We have a companywide, it's not quite stand up because it's 33 minutes long, but every Monday I really gets there and then talks about what you do this weekend and what are you up to. We found over time that eventually there was more cats and also dogs but cats than non-cats there around the way. It ended up being renamed to cat meet up. There's not always a lot of cats up on it but new people joining the company they go, "What? Why is it cat meet up?"

Just enjoy the weird, enjoy the fluffy. We just had an interview with someone about a week ago and she's super apologetic, she's like, "I'm so sorry my cat may end up walking directly in front of the camera as we're talking, which it eventually did." I was like, "No, it just means you're going to fit right in around here."

J.T. Grimes: Exactly. We asked as part of the interview process what pet do you have, and if you say none, I mean that's not good for getting a callback.

J.T. Grimes: What one thing do you absolutely hate about PHP, Laravel, COBOL?

Matt Stauffer: [crosstalk 00:45:24].

J.T. Grimes: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: I love that question. It's one of my favorite questions because everyone could talk about the good things. It's when you actually have had real life experience with it, that you can start talking about the things that really bother you.

J.T. Grimes: Yeah, that gives you a really good idea of how deep their knowledge is. If they were interviewing for PHP job and they've never really written production code, there are things that they just haven't been burned by it, and they will. If your biggest hang up about PHP is variable order or function naming I'm with you that that's annoying, but that's the first year complain.

Matt Stauffer: Totally true. I totally believe you. Are there any signs on a tech interview that are an instant no, instant start, no way, not going to happen. I mean, I'm sure there are some personally if somebody saying some horribly racist things or whatever. Are there any kind of coding or communication style things anything like that, where you just go, when do you see that, that's a definite no.

J.T. Grimes: I have a very direct communication style, we try to think will much pressure anyone who follows me on Twitter. I think the only thing that would surprise them is that I've gone this long without coercion.

Matt Stauffer: I'm pretty impressed.

J.T. Grimes: Sometimes I spend time around kids, I actually can't turn it off. I really value that kind of direct communication style and if I feel like I'm not getting that back, if I feel like someone is sort of coming at things in a roundabout way. I might take it as a lack of confidence in an interview and I might try and draw them out and see if I can get them to be more direct. If it seems like this is really their communication style all the time, I know that, that really, really hard for me to work with.

Matt Stauffer: Are you all remote or are you in-person?

J.T. Grimes: We are in-person.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. I've noticed that indirect communication is even harder when you're remote, but I mean in general just being able to communicate in a certain way is totally necessary for every environment, so I hear you on that for sure. What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

J.T. Grimes: If you go on a date with someone and they're a bad kisser end it then, because they're not going to get better at anything else.

Matt Stauffer: All right.

J.T. Grimes: And you can cut that too if you need to.

Matt Stauffer: Oh, are you kidding meant? See, Laravel Podcast season three is about the people not the code, so whatever else you got just keep a calm. What's your favorite beverage to drink?

J.T. Grimes: Diet 7up, I like my water sweet and sparkly.

Matt Stauffer: Wait a minute, diet 7up, not seven ... Is it diet because of your concern about sugar intake or do you prefer the taste or?

J.T. Grimes: It started as sugar intake with as much sodas I drank. If it was sugared I could not fit out in my house, but I've gotten so used to the diet soda taste that now when I do drink a real soda it just taste too sweet and weird, and why is my tongue [crosstalk 00:48:29]. Oh it's supposed to, oh dear.

Matt Stauffer: Right, got it. Okay, so we're running short on time, and I feel like there's a whole personality person of J.T., J.T. what do you do in your free time?

J.T. Grimes: Not as much as I would like, so this is going to set you up for the next podcast with me.

Matt Stauffer: Brilliant.

J.T. Grimes: I am suffering from burnout really bad right now, I suffer from depression. It can be really hard to just get off the couch during my downtime, when I can exercise, walk the dog, just hang out outside get some sun, read. Right now, not enough in my free time.

Matt Stauffer: I hope that I'm not centering myself by saying this, but burnout depression and anxiety are all part of my story as well. Thank you for sharing it because I know that it's not always easy to share. Having kind of been in that place, especially is burnout, I assume that you mean kind of work related burnout?

J.T. Grimes: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: One of the things that I've noticed often is that sleep, rest, being outdoors, people, animals, these kind of foundational things are often like a really big part of the things that help people like to start to kind of breathe again. Have you found that there's things outside of those that are also really helpful, or is it really just like centreing in on the simplest beautifulest things and just kind of really staying in those same places is what's most helpful?

J.T. Grimes: I had a shrink tell me once that there are three things that are protective against depression, and I have found that there are the three things that help the most. Family and connectedness, family, friends, people, pleasure doing things that you actually enjoy and feelings of accomplishment. That one doesn't seem to be on most people's list, but when you're depressed and it feels like nothing goes right, just small little steps forward just being able to look at something and go, "Hey, I did that. I got the dishes put away. Yes! Yay me!"

It is something you can build on and start working with.

Matt Stauffer: I know and I don't want to read into your story mind, but I want to see if this goes anywhere for you. For me, one of the hardest parts about chemical depression and depression versus just being sad is that, it's not that there's a thing that happens and you go, "Oh, I'm sad about that thing." People often hear depression, they think sadness about bad things, but it's a lot more kind of ... it's more complicated, it's less directly tied to circumstances and events, and it is a lot harder to reconcile or rectify than just being saddest.

Is that an experience you have, and if so, is there anything that you feel like people should understand about that circumstance or that experience or people who are suffering from that, that you want people to be more aware of?

J.T. Grimes: I think that depression is a really unfortunate name for this problem. I feel like it is an energy disorder, like when I am depressed for me it comes out as just having almost no energy to do anything.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah for sure.

J.T. Grimes: The other thing is for me depression doesn't take the form particularly of sadness, so much as kind of a flattening of mood. I'm not sad but it's really hard for me to get happy. I think that I know everyone experiences depression differently if people listening are going, "Well, that's not what it is at all." You're right your thing is your thing, and your thing is real, but I also feel like those are pretty common ways to experience depression.

If you're dealing with someone who struggles with depression trying to cure them up and make them not sad does not address the, they have no energy or their mood is flat.

Matt Stauffer: Acknowledging that everyone's experience of depression is different, what does it look like for someone to be a good friend to J.T. when she's experiencing these things?

J.T. Grimes: For me, the biggest thing is understanding and helping me to manage my energy level. I will try and schedule things early in the week because I know that I recharged over the weekend and then as the week goes on my energy level drops and drops and drops and drops. If you invite me to something on a Friday or a Saturday there's no change I'm going to do it.

I might agree to do it, there's no chance it's going to happen. First, I need you to not hold against me that I am bailing out because I can't do it, but I need you to understand what I can and can't do and not push too hard for the things I can't do. Sometimes push a little bit for the things that maybe I can.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, which is sounds like the foundational core of this, it is appreciating you not just for the presence you bring or that comedy you bring to a situation but for the person you are. Also, knowing you deeply and well enough to know those, I don't want to say idiosyncrasies but the ways that you uniquely experience, the difficulties in the places you should and should not be put.

Everyone just like said, everyone has an experience of the same which means the whole Monday versus Friday thing is probably not the case for somebody else. Someone can't just say, "Well, I heard this on a podcast once and so therefore my sister depression or my brother depression something like that, I'm not going to treat him this way," like no you know the person deeply and you know in their words and their experiences what that looks like.

I love you saying that, but now that brings my next question that requires you to have a level of self-awareness and willingness to describe it. First of all to the friends around you, but right now tens of thousands of people. What is it look like to get to the place where you're comfortable, you're self-aware enough and you're comfortable with sharing it?

J.T. Grimes: Well, first I didn't know tens of thousands of people were going to be listening, so now just if you could raise everything that would be great.

Matt Stauffer: Just raise everything, yeah.

J.T. Grimes: For me, I don't want to go off on too big a tangent here but we're going to go off on a bit of one.

Matt Stauffer: Let's do it.

J.T. Grimes: I am gay. I prefer that term to lesbian because lesbian sounds like a diagnosis and gay sounds fun.

Matt Stauffer: I love it.

J.T. Grimes: But I came out in the Bay Area in the early '90s and had a really easy time of it relatively speaking. I didn't lose family, I didn't lose friends, I didn't lose my job. Everybody was either okay with it or not great with it but not going to say anything, which in the early '90s-

Matt Stauffer: That's a win.

J.T. Grimes:... was an amazing. The reason I was able to do that is because other people had done the hard work first, other people had come out and had lost their jobs, had lost their families. By the time, I came along everybody I knew everybody living in the Bay Area already knew gay people, I was not some demon freak evil sent from ... It was just another gay person.

For me knowing that knowing other people coming out and talking about their experience made it easier for me, makes me feel not necessarily obliged, but it lets me know the value of talking about it when we come to my depression. I can do the heavy lifting for someone else. I can be out about these are the things I struggle with, this is how I deal with it.

Morley Safer, I think it was Morley Safer, man I'm old, was one of the hosts on 60 Minutes, and I remember him saying you know essentially coming out and saying he was on [talk show 00:56:51] and being at home watching it go and, "Hey, that's the same thing I'm on. I could be on 60 minute." Being able to see other people who share the same experience as you and seeing that it is not necessarily that debilitating, seeing that there's hope, that there is hope is the biggest thing. It's huge.

Matt Stauffer: Well, for those listening you could be a guest or a host on Laravel Podcast with depression. It is possible. Thanks J.T. it's really helpful to hear that, and so I'm going to dig a little further in this again with those spaces where you just, you got to say for it. The PHP community if you compare it against for example the Ruby community, or the Javascript through CSS communities, it's a little bit more monocultural. It's a little bit more old school.

Especially, like the SaaS community and the Ruby communities are extremely intentionally and thoughtfully and loudly progressive. I wouldn't use those terms to describe the PHP community, and not to say that we're in a repressive horrible place.

Do you have any reflections about, or thoughts about, or experiences you want to share, or warnings for encouragements for the PHP community in particular and also Laravel about ways that ... I don't want to prescribe anything else. Do you have anything to share or say?

J.T. Grimes: I come from a place of privilege not just as a white person but as a person who owns my own home and has valuable skills that people will pay for. It puts me in a really good place to tell not just my employers but really anyone else, where they can shove anything that they have about me.

That's really freeing and it makes me not care if the PHP community is less, is more conservative maybe than I might like. Then it would be if I ran the world. If I ran the world we would all be happy little liberals running around but it's not my world, very sad.

I come from a place where if somebody doesn't agree with me, if somebody doesn't like me, if somebody's opinions are different from mine I'm happy to talk to them for a while, but I don't care. I don't care that you don't agree, I don't care that you don't like me. I have a dog. My dog likes me.

Matt Stauffer: Your dog loves you, [crosstalk 00:59:32].

J.T. Grimes: My dog does love me.

Matt Stauffer: Cool, now that makes sense.

J.T. Grimes: I can't change the community except by being a part of it and being me publicly, reasonably publicly. I can tell you that there are a gay Laravel developers I know this because I am one. I can tell you that there are women Laravel developers. I know this because I am one. I can't speak to things that I'm not, but I would tell people that there are enough of us who will welcome you whatever you bring.

Matt Stauffer: I love that and when I push you about that is, because I know you well enough to know that when you say whatever you bring you don't mean whatever non-white, non-male, non-liberal thing you bring. You mean whatever you bring and I think that one of the things I love about that is, what I want to hear from people is, you can be just as conservative as you want as long as you're welcoming people. You can just be as liberal as you want just as long as you're welcoming people.

I don't want to go too far down this road, but one of the things that I've noticed is that some communities go, I think so far in the intentionally progressive direction that they're unwelcoming to conservatives. That's a frustrating thing as well because if we're in a place where someone who may have a different viewpoint is not welcome, who's not mistreating people. They're not treating people poorly because their viewpoint they're just having different viewpoint, then it doesn't matter which direction the difference is coming from, you're still making people not welcome.

That statement you said at the end there whatever you have to bring, whoever you are, you're welcome here. I think that that is a really ... I mean I know I'm making a small thing sound like a big thing, but in some ways it is a big thing. That's a beautiful message. All right. We are pretty late on the call. I'm trying to look at a couple questions that I cued up. Let me see if I got anything else.

Is there anything you want to talk about? Anything you wish we had covered? Anything you want to share? Anything you want to plug?

J.T. Grimes: Hyenas are really cool and I can do 20 minutes on how awesome hyenas are.

Matt Stauffer: I feel like you need a podcast.

J.T. Grimes: Possibly.

Matt Stauffer: I would listen to it. Can you give me like that 30 second version of why hyenas are really cool.

J.T. Grimes: Hyenas are a matriarchy, they are a pack hunter. Most of the time in the nature specials where you see the lion sitting with the kill and the hyenas skulking around. The hyenas killed it and the lion has bullied them away and taken their food. Hyenas poop white because they crunch up the bones of their prey.

Matt Stauffer: And get all the them in and out.

J.T. Grimes: Yeah, and as those bones come out you get white poo.

Matt Stauffer: Now, is that exciting because they're so smart that they're getting them mirror out, or is it literally just because they are white poo? Is that mean like the excitement there?

J.T. Grimes: It's because they can crunch up the bones-

Matt Stauffer: That's pretty bold.

J.T. Grimes:... of their prey.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, that's true. My entire exposure to hyenas has been Lion King. I got to be honest.

J.T. Grimes: You have two young kids so you know Lion King backwards and forwards and upside down.

Matt Stauffer: The funny thing there is actually my kids are, my daughters too young for that stuff. My son is extremely emotionally sensitive and so movies where bad things happen he really doesn't like. I mean imagine Disney movies, what Disney movie doesn't start out with some family member dying, so Lion King, it took us really long. He still hasn't seen what's the one of the big old giant inflated white guy that I want to call them Big ...

J.T. Grimes: Big something-

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, Big Hero 6.

J.T. Grimes:... Big Hero 6.

Matt Stauffer: It's a brilliant movie but I can't see it because my son see it yet because somebody dies at the beginning. So Lion King he's seen all of once, but now that he's seen it which was very recently. Now, you're right I will hear it 10,000 times. Anyway J.T., I keep saying this to people I could talk for hours. You should talk for hours you should get that podcast. I will listen to it. I'll plug it to everybody, but until then. Thank you so much.

People want to follow you on Twitter it's jt_grimes. J.T. Grimes. Just look for Cal everything and the little cartoon character. It has been an absolute pleasure talking to you and I thank you so much for your time.

Matt Stauffer: Welcome back to Laravel Podcast, season three. This is the second interview, episode three, where we're going to be talking to Neo Ighodaro, big man around town in Laravel Nigeria. Stay tuned.

All right. Welcome back to Laravel Podcast! I've got to figure out how to number these things because technically, this is episode three because the first one was a preview, but that confused a lot of people, so welcome back to the second interview of season three of the Laravel Podcast. I have my actually relatively recent friend with me. His name's Neo, and I've been pronouncing it Ighodaro the whole time. Is that actually how to say it? How do you say your name? Say it, not me saying it.

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, you're actually saying it correctly.

Matt Stauffer: Could you say it, though? I want to hear you say it.

Neo Ighodaro: Okay. Natively, the "g" is silent, so it's more like I-ho-da-ro, but a lot of people call it Ighodaro and I kind of feel more comfortable with Ighodaro because it sounds better, in my opinion.

Matt Stauffer: So, if I tried to say it without the "g," you'd actually prefer I say it the way I just said it?

Neo Ighodaro: With the "g."

Matt Stauffer: Okay. I have some friends.. one of my friends whose name is Al-bear-to ... I don't even know the Spanish pronunciation.

Neo Ighodaro: Alberto.

Matt Stauffer: I would try to learn how to say it, right? "Al-bear-to." He's like no, no, no. Just call me Alberto (pronounced like an American) and I was like, "But that's not your name," and we had kind of this big back and forth and what he ended up saying was, "When an English-speaking person says it in an English sentence, I prefer it to be the English pronunciation, and then when a Spanish-speaking person says it in a Spanish sentence, I prefer it to be the Spanish pronunciation." I've never heard anybody say that before, because I'm always like, "I don't care. I want to pronounce your name the right way," but for me, more important than the right way is what you want, so I'm here. I'm with you. Neo Ighodaro.

It’s fantastic to have you on. If anybody hasn't heard about Neo before, the way that he has most primarily been known in the Laravel world is because he is one of the three organizers. I don't know ... who's the founder? Are all three of you the founders, what are you the founder and now three of the organizers? How does that work?

Neo Ighodaro: I and Prosper basically are the founders, so we just got together and started it. We decided to get people on board, so Lynda was the third person. Now, we have a couple of other people who are silent organizers, but they help out every single time we have a Meetup.

Matt Stauffer: Okay, and by the way, I didn't actually finish my sentence before I asked you one because I interrupt myself. The "it" that Neo and I are talking about is Laravel Nigeria, which is this kind of Meetup, but it's kind of a conference, because it's as big as all the other Laravel conferences, even though they're calling it a "Meetup," but people are traveling from five hours away. It's a really big deal, so we'll talk about that maybe a little bit later. But what I told Neo beforehand was, "This is not actually about that Meetup. This is not actually about you being the CTO of a big tech company. What this really is about is knowing you as a person and what you're about," and if anybody listened to the Taylor interview I did before, we didn't talk so much about Laravel.

We talked for a little bit about just kind of Taylor and where he comes from, so maybe we'll down the road there, but the tiniest little bit of context, he's one of the two founders. He's one of the three formal organizers, and there's also some silent organizers of Laravel Nigeria. If you haven't looked it up, I'll put a link to a write-up that he did in the show notes, but you're just seeing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people once every couple months come together and teach and learn. There's actually a couple of your talks that are online, so I'll make sure to link a couple of those that I think Pusher's hosting. You can hear him speak. You can see what he's organizing. He's the CTO of Hotels.ng, which is a really big tech company out of Nigeria and y'all are in Lagos, right? Ah, pronunciation.

Neo Ighodaro: We're in Lagos.

Matt Stauffer: More of them. I've been saying "lay-goes" like "go," but then last night, I looked it up and they said "lay-guhs," not "goes", so is that another one?

Neo Ighodaro: Exactly.

Matt Stauffer: Oh, I'm murdering these things.

Neo Ighodaro: Lay-gas, yeah.

Matt Stauffer: I also, several times when we were first talking, I would refer to Lagos as if it were only a city, not knowing it was both a city and a state, so it's kind of like a New York, New York thing, right? Like New York is both a city and state, Lagos is also a city and a state. Now I know these things.

Neo Ighodaro: Yes.

Matt Stauffer: The tiniest bit of context, and I want you to teach me a little more, because basically over the last week, I've been Wikipedia-ing all these things, is that Nigeria's the biggest economy in Africa and then Lagos is the most significant economy in Nigeria. Then Lagos city is such a significant economy that it would have been one of the biggest economies in Africa just as a city alone, and it is the twentieth largest economy of any city in the entire world. This is a significant thing because I think a lot of folks, they understand some general names, some general locations, some general cultural concepts of various African cities and states and countries, but I don't know if they have that much context, understanding that this is a huge place. Are you actually in the city, or are you in a different city in the state?

Neo Ighodaro: It's kind of hard to explain, but-

Matt Stauffer: I figured.

Neo Ighodaro: Lagos, as a whole, like you said, is a city and a state. It's a city and a state because it's quite small geographically. It's really small, so you can't really call it a state and it's so small that you can't not call it a city, I mean, and it's so small in the sense that you want to call it a state because officially, it is a state, but I mean, it's just so small for you to call it any other thing.

Matt Stauffer: Now, is it like Singapore, where if you're in the state, you're also in the city?

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. Pretty much.

Matt Stauffer: I assumed that there were other cities within the state?

Neo Ighodaro: No.

Matt Stauffer: So, if you're in Lagos the state, you're basically in the city?

Neo Ighodaro: They're just ... we like to call them local governments.

Matt Stauffer: Got it.

Neo Ighodaro: They are like small, small, very tiny, little regions that you can probably drive like one hour across each region, so it's kind of like a big-

Matt Stauffer: But all those regions are within the city?

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

Neo Ighodaro: Within the city slash state.

Matt Stauffer: Okay, so it is a little bit like Singapore in that way. When I think of big cities, I spent a couple years living in Chicago, so I think about Chicago as being a very large city, so Chicago has three million people. It has, I think, I'm trying to remember how many square ... 230 square miles and so Lagos has 16 million people and it has, I think 400 and something square miles, so we're talking many, many, many times the size of Chicago. Also, it's a city, it's a state, and it's all these kind of things, so I think just getting that kind of out of the way and understanding those things helped me a little bit of the context of why when I was like, "Oh, yeah. You're in Lagos," you're like, "Yeah, but" ... We've got to talk a little bit more than that.

-So, you are in Nigeria. You are the CTO of Hotels.ng. You are doing all this kind of stuff, so let's actually get to the meat of it. First question: When did you first have access to a computer and where was it, and for what reason?

Neo Ighodaro: I would say when I was about 13. Back in the day before internet was quite popular in Nigeria, it was really, really difficult to get your hands on a computer, so I think one of those cybercafes. They're not really cafes in the sense of it. It's just basically a shop where you have a bunch of computers and then you pay some amount of money to get access to those computers to use their internet. I think one of those days, I was about 13, and I got some extra money and I just went to the internet. It was mostly to chat, though.

Matt Stauffer: What was the chat protocol that y'all used back then?

Neo Ighodaro: I think Yahoo Messenger was very popular then and MSN-

Matt Stauffer: I remember that.

Neo Ighodaro: Or one of those ones. I was always on them.

Matt Stauffer: Did they have computers in your schools at that point, or not until later?

Neo Ighodaro: It's kind of tricky because we did have computers in the school, but it was not computers for everyone. It's privileged access at the computer.

Matt Stauffer: Really?

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. It was horrible.

Matt Stauffer: I told you beforehand that you get to tell me when I'm digging too far, but-

Neo Ighodaro: No, it's fine.

Matt Stauffer: What privilege gives you access? Is it a particular type of study or something else? What privileges someone to get to use the computer?

Neo Ighodaro: Back then, the first thing is ... we had this computer science subject, basically, where we had to learn about computers, but they usually just write it on the board and like, "Okay, this is a CPU. This is a disk." Was it disk? Did we call it disk back then? What's the name of that thing, the square thing where you save stuff?

Matt Stauffer: The hard-drive?

Neo Ighodaro: No, no. The one back in the day, so you have this thing-

Matt Stauffer: Oh, you mean a floppy disk?

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. Floppy disk, so they'll tell you, "This is the floppy disk," and we never saw any of them. We just had pictures and then-

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

Neo Ighodaro: Once in a while, maybe once in an entire term, they'd be like, "Let's go to the computer room," and then we go and we see them. We don't touch them.

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

Neo Ighodaro: You're actually forbidden to touch them.

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

Neo Ighodaro: You see them and they're like, "Oh, that's the CPU they were talking about. Oh, it looks so cool," but looking from five meters away like, "Yo. Don't touch it."

Matt Stauffer: Now, why was it that you couldn't touch it? Was it because there were so few that they were precious, or was there something else going on?

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, yeah. Pretty much. It was more like a new thing back then, so they were pretty expensive.

Matt Stauffer: Got it.

Neo Ighodaro: And they didn't really trust kids back then, so-

Matt Stauffer: Understandably.

Neo Ighodaro: If you became a prefect, for instance, we have this thing where certain students, depending on your academic abilities or your leadership skills, you become a prefect, so to speak, and then you'll be able to have access to certain things that other students didn't have.

Matt Stauffer: Got it.

Neo Ighodaro: As a prefect, I was able to have some access, limited access.

Matt Stauffer: But it was still very limited, so it was really the cybercafe that gave you the space to do what you wanted to do. You started out chatting. When did you transition from chatting to thinking that you were going to be able to create something?

Neo Ighodaro: I was 15. I remember very clearly the day. It's actually a kind of funny story. I was subject to some bad people in school and I wasn't really keen on going to school at that point because they were always bullying because I was very little in school. They were always bullying and at some point, I was like, "You know what? Screw this, man. I can't deal," and then I started going to cybercafes. Instead of going to classes, I'd just go to cybercafes. I mean, I'm not happy about it, but it was sort of-

Matt Stauffer: It's what it is. It's your story, so ...

Neo Ighodaro: One of those days, I decided to check out an internet café and that was it. I just liked going there. I felt safe there. I could literally just bury myself in whatever I was doing and not worry about anything else.

Matt Stauffer: That's really cool, so you spent more and more time there, even skipping class to go there. You were chatting originally, but what was the moment or was there a project, or what kind of piqued your interest in creating something on the web?

Neo Ighodaro: I don't really remember the thought process, but I remember thinking at some point ... I saw this one guy. He went to the café to, I don't know what he was doing there, but I saw him typing some random stuff and I was just like, "What is this guy doing? It doesn't seem like English." It just looked random. I walked up to him and I was like, "Hey, dude. Sorry, but what are you doing?" and he was like he's learning how to program. That was the moment I just thought, "Okay, program. What exactly is a program?" I'm not sure if Google was a thing then, but I know I was using Yahoo Search a lot, so I tried to Google and I stumbled upon the word HTML. One thing led to another and I started thinking, "Hey, how is yahoo.com actually made?"

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: I started digging and I find out, "Oh, okay. You need something called HTML." I had no idea what it was, and I was like, "I could probably learn that instead of chatting and wasting my time"-

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro:"I could probably learn how to make HTML." That was pretty much the thought process and one thing led to another. I just kept on going and finding out more about HTML. I literally did not know the meaning. I didn't actually care. I just wanted to learn the thing.

Matt Stauffer: That's fascinating, so you learned enough that I'm sure you were making your own little local HTML things. Do you remember what the first page you made was about?

Neo Ighodaro: Oh, it was a personal page, obviously.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: A site called uni.cc or something like that. It was one of these Geocities type of thing-

Matt Stauffer: Sure.

Neo Ighodaro: Where you just go and then they give you a sub-domain and a name and then you just kind of mash up the HTML in there. I created one of those and I remember there was this guy. I've forgotten his name, but he was a really big influence back then. There was the time of Greymatter. I don't know if you've heard of it?

Matt Stauffer: I haven't.

Neo Ighodaro: It was a blogging platform. It was close to what we have in WordPress, but it was called Greymatter. I think his name is Tony. He used to create all these blogs and then there were a lot of young people and they had a lot of blogs that they created. They create these blogs and then they just write random stuff in it, but I was more interested in how the blogs looked. They looked so beautiful and I was like, "Why does mine just look like a bunch of marquee running around the screen?"

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: I was forced to learn design, so I had to start digging in. I heard about Photoshop, so I picked it up.

Matt Stauffer: I love that you got there because when we first met, I went over to CreativityKills. Would I be right to describe CreativityKills as essentially your freelance web development kind of company? And I don't even know freelance, but your web development consultancy that was your main thing before you started working at Hotels.ng, and you still kind of keep it running on the side? Is that a good description for it?

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, pretty much.

Matt Stauffer: What I noticed there ... I went to portfolio, and the moment I see ... I think it was portfolio or work or something, but what I saw instead of code or descriptions, was I saw screenshots. The moment I see that, I say, "This person's probably a designer," and the design was good too, so you're not just a programmer. Tell me how do you think of yourself? Do you think of yourself as a designer and a programmer? Have you trained in one more than the other, or do you think of yourself as a hack in one and really good at the other? How do you kind of approach your skillset?

Neo Ighodaro: I think to really answer the question, I have to go a little back to the origins. Like I said, I learned about you have to design your sites for it to look good. I was like, "How do I get there?" and I heard of Photoshop. I started going to the cybercafes. Instead of learning how to write HTML, I was learning how to design, so it was a hassle, to be honest. It was really difficult because you had 30 minutes to learn, literally 30 minutes to learn everything you wanted. I basically started learning and a couple of people just noticed that I come regularly and some people just randomly gave me some extra time.

Matt Stauffer: Oh, cool.

Neo Ighodaro: I was able to pick up a couple of designs. I actually have a link to one my first ever designs. I still have-

Matt Stauffer: That's going in the show notes. That is going in the show notes.

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. It took me about 12 hours chopped into 30 minutes-

Matt Stauffer: I was going to say, 30-minute increments of 12 hours, and it's not as if you could take it home. I mean, once the 30 minutes is up-

Neo Ighodaro: You're done.

Matt Stauffer: Did you have a thumb drive that you were saving everything on, or how did that work?

Neo Ighodaro: I had a floppy disk, so every time I go, I was like, "Does this computer support floppy disk?" If they were like, "No," I was like, "No. I'm not doing this." I actively looked for a computer with a floppy disk and I had to download Photoshop-

Matt Stauffer: Every time.

Neo Ighodaro: Every single time.

Matt Stauffer: Oh my gosh.

Neo Ighodaro: Exactly.

Matt Stauffer: Oh my gosh.

Neo Ighodaro: It was hectic.

Matt Stauffer: That's incredible.

Neo Ighodaro: Pretty much.

Matt Stauffer: You taught yourself how to design, so both in terms of design and HTML, I'm assuming that ... because I know that when I started, there weren't a lot of books around teaching this. Were you learning it purely online and, if so, do you remember any of the sites you used to learn?

Neo Ighodaro: I remember the site I used to learn how to make my first-ever graphic, but I don't think I really learned any of the other ones, I mean, the tool sets and everything, using any site online. I was basically just "mash, mash, mash." It's "mash, mash," and it worked, I'm like, "Oh."

Matt Stauffer: View source, copy, paste, modify.

Neo Ighodaro: Exactly. Something like that, so I was just editing. I would just pick a tool and drag it across the screen. I was like, "Try to figure out what does this do." But the first night I learned about actually making vector images was vexiles.net. I don't know if they're still around right now, but it taught me how to take a picture and turn it into a kind of vecto graphic.

Matt Stauffer: Trace it with the ... what are those things called? The pen tool and everything like that?

Neo Ighodaro: Exactly.

Matt Stauffer: Very cool. I think that's pretty similar to how I learned. I remember I got my first book when I was five or 10 years into it and it was such a foreign process because I was like, "Wait. I have to sit down and read 50 pages and then" ... It just didn't translate. I was like, "No. You just kind of figure it out as you go." You started programming when you were 15. I'm guessing the design was a little bit later than that. At which point did you realize this was not just something that was just a fun thing to do with your time, but it was something you were actually going to consider turning into a career?

Neo Ighodaro: I think I was about 17 or 18. That was when I actually creating the skills unofficially. I had a couple of friends back then and they had these really nice names for their website. There was Aether Reality.net. They just had really, really random names and I was like, "I could come up with one," and I don't know. I can't remember exactly how, but I was thinking in the lines of, "What if you had a company that portrayed designs to die for?" I sort of just circulated around that concept until I got to the point CreativityKills. I can't remember how it clicked or when I clicked, but I just know at some point, I was like, "Creativity kills." It kind of had a negative connotation, especially culturally, but I felt like people needed to ask questions like, "Well, how does creativity kill?" It kind of was the one thing that I knew could make my brand stand out, because people became curious.

Matt Stauffer: I love that. It doesn't give you all the answers just from reading it. It makes you ask questions and that's something you wanted. I mean, that clearly lines up with the story you're telling me is you literally walked over to somebody else in the café and said, "What is that jumble you're typing into your screen right now?" That's really fascinating. Did you have any people around you or any role models where you said, "Oh, I'm going to do this like that other person I know or that other person I've seen," or was it more of a just kind of, "Hey, this is a thing I can try out and see what happens"?

Neo Ighodaro: But anyways, the Tony guy, I think I still have him on Facebook or something. He didn't know it, to be honest. I was just more of an admirer from afar type of person and I really liked how he designed and everything, so he was sort of my role model in design. But when it came to HTML and PHP and the other program language, I didn't really have anybody. It was just me. Just me and nobody else.

Matt Stauffer: At some point, you went from, "What is this computer and internet thing?" to "What is this coding thing?" to "What is this design thing?" to "I know these things well enough that I could make things" to "I know these things well enough that I could convince someone else to pay me money to do it." Those are a lot of shifts to happen over the span of, I think, two years basically. There's not a lot of other people around you who are doing kind of development consultancies and design consultancies and stuff like that, so how did you figure it out? What were your early challenges? Who were your early clients? What did it look like for you to create CreativityKills and turn it into actually making income?

Neo Ighodaro: I had to figure out every single thing myself. I didn't know anything about marketing. They didn't even cross my mind, to be honest. When I started, I created a website for it. I don't have the template anymore, but I was proud of it then. I'm not sure I would be now.

Matt Stauffer: Right, right.

Neo Ighodaro: I had this lady. She wanted to create a website for her NGO and she met me. She heard of me from my friend, so my friend told her, "Oh, I have this guy. He's probably be cheap and he does websites."

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: She was like, "Okay. Let me meet him," and I talked to her. She told me, "This is what I want. This is what I want," and I was like, "Okay, cool." Back then, I only knew HTML to be honest. I didn't know PHP and so I was like, "How do I swing this?" I then went to a cybercafe again and I started Googling, no, I was Yahooing, basically-

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: Because I don't think I was using Google then. I was trying to figure out, "How do I make a website as dynamic?" and I think that's where I stumbled upon PHP. Somebody was talking about PHP and CGI scripts and all the stuff and I was like, "This seems like something to go into." Then I had about two months, so I gave a deadline of two months to deliver the project, so I had roughly about a month to learn PHP. PHP just jumped at me. I was like, "Let me just go with this one." I heard of ESB. I heard of a lot of ones, but PHP just seemed welcoming. I mean, that's the allure of the language, anyways. I was like, "I'm going to do this," and I jumped on it.

The learning process was difficult. I didn't pick it up in one month. I actually just knew a bit, a few things, because of 30 minutes increments, 30 minute, 30 minute. At some point, I stumbled upon Greymatter and WordPress and then I was like, "Okay, so this kind of makes you build a website easily. I could do this. I mean, it doesn't look so complicated." I had to figure out how to host websites, so I hosted her website. I paid for the domains and everything and then in about two months, I came and said, "Hey, look at your website," and she paid me. I was so happy, like, "This is my first income. I did it alone." It was a happy moment for me, but from then on, I started feeling like, "What if I could take that one client and kind of expand my reach, try to reach other people?"

I mean, one person old one person, so obviously, there's some sort of system to it. I started digging about SEO and I started digging into marketing and that's pretty much ... one thing led to another, and most of the things I learned, I had to learn because when you work to a certain degree, you hit a bump. Then you're like, "What to do next?" and then you get introduced to certain concepts, and then you learn about that. Then you hit another bump, and, then, "What do I do next?" That was pretty much my learning phase. I just kept on hitting bumps. Initially, it was the HTML.

Then I was like, "The HTML has to look nice," so I had to go to CSS. "Now the visual aspects have to look nice," so I went to Photoshop, then I went back to HTML. I realized that you can't really do much with HTML. You need some dynamics. I went to JavaScript and it was really, really difficult, so I left it. I heard of PHP. I went to PHP and I realized I have to go back to JavaScript. I went back to JavaScript and then to Jaggery. It was just-

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: One thing leading to the other.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah. You do what you can until you hit a pain point and then you figure out the simplest possible thing to fix that pain point and then move on to the next pain point.

Neo Ighodaro: Exactly.

Matt Stauffer: Very cool. You were writing procedural PHP back then. This is pretty early. I'm guessing it was right past when WordPress was created. You got WordPress. You got into Greymatter. Did you spend just a couple years there, basically building HTML and CSS websites with some Photoshop design and some WordPress and some Greymatter? Is that kind of your bread and butter for a while before you made shifts over to things like Laravel? I mean, Laravel, obviously came out much later than that, but did you kind of sit in that space, or were there other kind of steps in your journey between then and Laravel?

Neo Ighodaro: No. I sat there for a while. I really didn't think of structure or anything. I was there for a long time, probably a year or three years, between that range. I remember the first time I got introduced to CodeIgniter. I learned about CodeIgniter and I didn't really understand what MVC was. In my mind, I just wanted to write spaghetti code and be done with it, but I started seeing the benefits I made of separating concerns and I felt like it could help eventually. I mean, all those things I've created, plus it's a framework. It gives you a jumpstart and that was really what sold me. I didn't have to write my skill connect to this or my skill connect to that, I just put my details and I'm done. I got into CodeIgniter. After a while, I started ... my learning of PHP started evolving from spaghetti code to "How do we structure an application?" Then I started, and this is very interesting, actually. Because I didn't have a laptop or a PC. Laptops were a stretch. I didn't have a PC then. I had to do this thing. I decided to write a framework of my own, but I had just 30 minutes in a cybercafe, roughly.

Matt Stauffer: Is this still a floppy disk that you're using, or is this what you're about to tell me?

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, yeah. A floppy disk, so what I did was I bought a diary and I literally wrote my code in ink-

Matt Stauffer: No.

Neo Ighodaro: On the diary.

Matt Stauffer: No. Now why couldn't you just save it as HTML files and PHP files down in your floppy disk?

Neo Ighodaro: Let me explain. I had a couple of minutes, where if I'm going to ... let's just say, maximum, an hour and thirty minutes at the cybercafe-

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: That's when I have access, but I don't want to go there and start thinking of what to do.

Matt Stauffer: Oh.

Neo Ighodaro: Exactly, so my solution to-

Matt Stauffer: You're writing in the diary when you're not at the cybercafe as your brain is roiling over. Oh my goodness.

Neo Ighodaro: Exactly.

Matt Stauffer: That's amazing. I mean, I've done architectural diagrams in a journal and I've done the tiniest little bit of code, but writing a framework that way? No way. So, you basically show up, and the first thing you'd do is basically transcribe all your diary notes down into code and then see-

Neo Ighodaro: There was this thing. Nigeria's a very cultural state and then there was this day my mom stumbled upon the diary. She thought I was writing a lot of demonic stuff. She was like, "Oh my God."

Matt Stauffer: Oh, no.

Neo Ighodaro:"What is all this?" She literally thought I was possessed.

Matt Stauffer: It's funny because I was going to ask about your family, so this is perfect. What did your family think about this whole thing? You're skipping class. I mean, I don't know if they knew you were skipping class, but you're doing these computer things. You're in the cybercafes all the time. Was that something that you got a lot of support for, you got a lot of criticism for, or were they kind of ambivalent, they weren't sure how to feel?

Neo Ighodaro: A lot of criticism. An African family is a family that places a lot of value on education, so me skipping school then was horrible. I was literally the black sheep of the family just instantly. The day they find out, they were so disappointed. "How could you do this? Blah blah blah," and I was just staring, like, "Sorry." Then they were like, "We're really, really disappointed," and everything. Then the day they saw the writings on the book was my mom, she freaked out. She thought I was on some demonic tick and she was like she's going to call an entire family meeting, so the entire family gathered and they were like, "What is this you're writing?"

Matt Stauffer: Oh, no.

Neo Ighodaro: And I was not good enough to explain it, so I was just like, "It's code." "It's code for what?" And I was like-

Neo Ighodaro: Really made me continue to really fight for it, just because I felt like it made me a rebel.

Matt Stauffer: I love it. How long do you think it took before they really kind of understood, or do they now?

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, they do. It took a long time, until I was in the university, actually, and they started seeing some dividends like it was paying off. They were like, "Okay. This dude hasn't called us to ask for pocket money or anything, actually."

Matt Stauffer: Right, right.

Neo Ighodaro: They were like, "He probably is doing something right," and then they were like, "Okay, so what is this thing exactly?"

Matt Stauffer: Got it.

Neo Ighodaro: They were willing to come to the table and ask me questions like, "What does it do? How does it work?"

Matt Stauffer: Very cool.

Neo Ighodaro: Then there's this thing in Nigeria, so there are internet fraud stars a lot. They scam people of money and blah blah blah, but the idea is back in the day, when they see you, any young person in front of a computer, that is the instant thing they think, that you're a fraudulent person, that you're being ... they called it a "yahoo yahoo boy."

Matt Stauffer: They call it ... can you say it again? It didn't come through on Skype.

Neo Ighodaro: Yahoo yahoo. Like "yahoo" twice.

Matt Stauffer: Got it.

Neo Ighodaro: So they call you a yahoo yahoo boy. They were really concerned that that's what I was doing.

Matt Stauffer: Got it.

Neo Ighodaro: They really wanted to know because it was illegal and they didn't want any of the stuff and I was like, "No. I promise it's not actually that. It's literally the opposite," and they sort of just went with it. I don't think they really believed.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: They just had faith, so I guess they started to come around from there.

Matt Stauffer: That's fascinating and that transitions to the university. At some point, you were doing CodeIgniter, and I assume that was before university. At what point did you decide to go to university, or was this all happening at the same time?

Neo Ighodaro: Pretty much at the same time. After they found out that I'd been skipping school, I had to change schools, so I had to go to another one somewhere closer that it could monitor my movements and-

Matt Stauffer: Got it.

Neo Ighodaro: It didn't really stop me, actually. I did what I wanted to do anyways. The good part was I was sort of book smart to a point-

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: I was able to ace my exams and everything.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: That was the good part, so I didn't really need to go to school, because I knew if they found out that I didn't do a couple of tests, they would probably come and check the attendance sheet and everything.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: I made sure I aced most of my tests, most of my exams, but on the low-low, I was still trying to figure out what this entire programming thing was about.

Matt Stauffer: All right, so you went off to ... what did you actually study in university? Was it programming, or was it engineering? What was the actual formal title of it?

Neo Ighodaro: Mathematics and economics.

Matt Stauffer: Is that something you use in your daily life right now?

Neo Ighodaro: Nope. Nope.

Matt Stauffer: All right. Well-

Neo Ighodaro: Very big no.

Matt Stauffer: Well, yeah. I mean, I studied in English education when I was in school. I mean, technically, I don't use it, although the experiences I had there still inform me today. All right, so you went to university. You graduated from university. You got that degree. At what point did you transition from being Neo of CreativityKills who does kind of freelance contracting stuff to Neo who is, I mean, you're doing stuff out in the community. We'll talk about that in a bit. You're working at Hotels.ng. Now, I did see you had a blog post, I think it was in maybe 2016, so was this a pretty recent transition for you?

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. Pretty much.

Matt Stauffer: What was that like?

Neo Ighodaro: Let me step back a little. I'll tell you another interesting story. Ever before I owned my first laptop, how I got it was there was this guy, Kolade, he had a friend who wanted a programmer on one of their projects and then it was like, "Neo, you need to get on this," and I was like, "You know I don't have a laptop." He was like, "Okay, you know what? I'll tell them. They'll get you a laptop and then we can go from there." I was like, "How do I pay for it?" They were like, "No, don't worry." I was like, "Okay, cool."

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: I was so excited, but I just wanted to play it cool. Be cool, be cool, be cool. Then they brought the laptop and it was ugly. I appreciate it.

Matt Stauffer: Right, right, right.

Neo Ighodaro: I mean, I still have it.

Matt Stauffer: It's a laptop. Nice.

Neo Ighodaro: I appreciate it, but it was horrible, meaning if you unplugged the laptop, it would go off.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: The battery was finished. It was literally horrible.

Matt Stauffer: It was like a big gray box kind of thing?

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, and the problem with that was the situation of power in the country. You could literally go for an entire 24 hours without power at all. The internet was so expensive, but, I mean, somehow, I was able to manage. I had to go to school a couple of times. There's this hub where you could plug your stuff in.

Matt Stauffer: Got it.

Neo Ighodaro: I'd go there and plug. I remember some of those people always laughing at the laptop, like, "What is that?"

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: I was like, "Just ignore them. Just ignore them and do what you need to do." Fast forwarding, I had a sort of big break, right? It was during the period where BlackBerry was very popular in Nigeria, so I created this website with PHP. I think that's actually the first product I've ever created for myself.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: It was called FlashDp. What it did was it used ImageMagick to create a GIF and then you were able to use that GIF as a display picture on your BBM, BlackBerry Messenger. I did it because ... back in the day, because I wasn't too rich. Let me rephrase that. I was poor, so I had to find a way to make money at least.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: I found out people really like these GIFs and I used to create them on Photoshop a lot and then I thought about it, like, "There has to be a way to do this in PHP or some language." I was like, "Let me try." I sat down that day and I used Kohana. I don't know if you know it?

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, yeah.

Neo Ighodaro: Kohana framework? So, I used it and I came up with FlashDp and I gave a friend ... I was hosting it on Pagoda Box, so I gave a friend, like, "Hey, help me try this stuff. See if it works," and I went to bed. The next morning, the server had crashed.

Matt Stauffer: Oh my gosh.

Neo Ighodaro: I was like, "What is happening? What happened?" Then I went to analytics and I check. "Wow. A lot of people used it," and because it was very resource-intensive, I mean, it was ImageMagick trying to-

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: Generate images over and over again, so I was like, "Let me try and reboot the server." I didn't really know about servers then, but it was a click and reboot thing. I decided to create another version two. I decided, "Let me just give everybody, make people use it." Right?

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: I mean, it doesn't hurt. Then I gave people and I just put AdSense on it, and that was literally one of the best decisions I've made ever, because in the space of ... so I created it 2013 and in the space of about a year or two, I made about $37,000.

Matt Stauffer: What? What? Just from AdSense?

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. And in Nigeria, that's huge. Yes. In Nigeria, that's huge. That was huge money, so I was able to get my first MacBook. I was able to get a nice Mac and literally that point was the turning point, because I had all the tools I needed. I didn't need to write in a diary anymore.

Matt Stauffer: Right, right, right.

Neo Ighodaro: I could practice it without need for power for a long time at least. I literally had everything I needed to actually become better and I felt so empowered. That was around the period when I was in school, so I had a lot of time to myself.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: A lot of time to learn, a lot of time to actually go back, and that's when I started redesigning CreativityKills again. I went back to the drawing board and I was like, "How do we appeal to people?" I spent about eight months creating that site and I released it. I think it was on adwords.com for an honorable mention or something like that.

Matt Stauffer: Nice.

Neo Ighodaro: I was really proud of myself. I came out and I did it. It was crazy for me, but creating FlashDp itself was the turning point. That was the landmark in everything.

Matt Stauffer: That's incredible. I feel like I could dig into just this part of your story for another hour. I'm trying to keep this short. I'm going to move on, but that is fascinating. You said that was 2013, so at that point, you had gone from CodeIgnitor, you had moved over to Kohana. Let's move into modern Neo. Let's move in to Laravel. Let's move into the Laravel Nigeria Meetup. Let's move into Hotels.ng. When did you transition from Kohana to Laravel and what made you make that transition?

Neo Ighodaro: FlashDp made me make the decision. It was around this period where people were arguing about whether to use static methods or not, and I started feeling bad about Kohana because it had a lot of static methods. I was like, "Is there something out there that's better?"

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: I mean, obviously there might be, so I started digging and I found out about I think was it FuelPHP? I think Slim. I don't know if Slim was really around then, but I know I saw a bunch of them and I heard of Laravel and I was like, "I like the name." It has a ring to it. That was literally the only reason why I jumped on it.

Matt Stauffer: Wow. Wow.

Neo Ighodaro: I just liked the name. It was like, "I could try this," but I think it was around version four, around that period or something like that. I was like, "How does this work? I mean, it's usually the usual MVC stuff."

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: I was like, "This seems cool," and I realized that every single thing I did was easy. You want to do this? Easy. You want to do that?

Matt Stauffer: It just works.

Neo Ighodaro: Easy. Yeah. I was hooked. I was like, "I'm sold." It was hard for me leaving Kohana, because I had built a lot of packages back then.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: I built a Honey Pot module or Coconut. I forgot on what they called them, but it was a package for Kohana then, so I was kind of tied to the community, but I felt if it's better with Laravel, I could just try it. That was my switch. I created version two of FlashDp using Laravel 4. I just basically kept on digging into Laravel and digging and digging and digging. I also picked up Objective C during that period.

Matt Stauffer: All right.

Neo Ighodaro: I got an iPhone and I learned to jail break in. I learned you could create awesome stuff using a language called Objective C, so I pretty much dived into it and started learning Objective C, creating jail break tweaks, and all that stuff.

Matt Stauffer: Very cool.

Neo Ighodaro: Now, my transition into being Neo ... I had this thing where I said I was never going to work-

Matt Stauffer: For someone else?

Neo Ighodaro: For another company.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: But I realized that if I was to run any successful business, you need experience. It goes without ... you just need it. I was like, "I need to pick the right company." You just don't jump into it, right?

Matt Stauffer: Yep.

Neo Ighodaro: From, I think, 2015, I started scoping the Nigerian tech scene.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro:"Who would I want to work for?" I was nobody. I wasn't really known.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: But I knew I was good, so I started digging and digging and I found nothing, to be honest. I found nothing that I felt I wanted to work for until I think 2016. I was still in Benin. I schooled outside Lagos, by the way. I was still in Benin and I went to a school called University of Benin. That's UNIBEN. Then I sort of heard of Hotels.ng and I didn't really think much of it. I hadn't heard much about it, so I was like, "Meh." Then I had a friend called Lynda. So, cool story, she was the friend of somebody I knew back in the day, so my friend had been telling me, "Okay, Lynda, she's really good. She's really good." I was like, "Who is this Lynda? Who is she?" I went online and I researched and I heard she was the head of product at Hotels.ng and so I just pretty much said, "Hi. Oh hey, how you doing?"

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: Then we got to talking a little and then we kind of just hit it off pretty much. We were just talking and talking. Then I think I told her that I'm looking for a gig or something. I can't really remember the backstory, but I remember receiving an email. I came to Lagos because my mom had an accident.

Matt Stauffer: I'm sorry.

Neo Ighodaro: A very, almost mortal one. She was in a sickbed for a long time, so I was really sad. I came down to Lagos and went to see her in the hospital. It was a very bad, very depressing moment in my life, but, I mean, coming back gave me some sort of perspective on life, like, "Things don't last forever. You need to use whatever you have as quickly as you can," so I think I sent an application. I'm not really sure if I applied or not, but I remember receiving an email from Mark Essien, he's the CEO, and he was like, "Hey. I heard about you from Lynda. Can you come to the office for an interview?" My initial reaction was, "No," but I thought about it.

Matt Stauffer: Even though you had sent something in to them, right?

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. Then I thought about it. I was like, "You know what? It doesn't hurt. Let me just go."

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: That was literally my first interview ever. Ever.

Matt Stauffer: Ever, anywhere?

Neo Ighodaro: I was about 20-something then.

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

Neo Ighodaro: Twenty six-ish? And I was like, "Let me just go." I went and-

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: I remember him sitting in the office with three devs. Lynda wasn't around. I think she was on leave then. It was like, "What are these? What are these?" and it was calling computer science terms. I really didn't know any of them and I was like-

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro:"If this interview's to go like this, I'll literally fail because I don't know any of these terms. Give me a laptop."

Matt Stauffer: Do you say that out loud?

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, I did. Totally. I didn't know any of these terms.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro:"Just give me a laptop and I will show you what I can do."

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: Then he looked at me for a minute or so and then it was like, "Okay." Then he left and then sort of, I just felt like I'd already gotten the job. Then he left me with the devs and they kept on asking me different questions, like, "This, that, that," and then one of them was like, "I think I've seen your CreativityKills somewhere." I was like, "Ha, sold."

Matt Stauffer: Brilliant.

Neo Ighodaro: Then he was like, "Yeah. Can you show us stuff you've done?" Then I brought in my laptop and then I showed him ... I had this music site I created using Angular and PHP backed in on Laravel. I showed him, and the first thing he was like was, "Do you design your code?" Because it was so cleanly written. It was during a period where Jeffrey was always talking about, “small controller, thin controllers, this, that. Best practices, SOLID. This, that," and he literally asked me, "Do you design it? Do you sit down and format your code?" I was like, "No, not really. Maybe I have OCD or not. I don't know." But he was really impressed at the structure of the code and I was like, "Wow. He's never seen anybody designing this, like your code. You just write code. It makes no difference to the compiler, you know?"

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: I was like, "I like to see my code as art. If I feel good about it, I feel happy, but I just don't want to jumble everything. He was like, "Cool." I think that was the day I got the job. I hadn't even gotten home and I got another email saying, "You're hired." He was like, "Can you start tomorrow?" and I was like, "Okay."

Matt Stauffer: All right.

Neo Ighodaro: It was a big leap. That's right. I literally-

Matt Stauffer: You were hired as a programmer upfront, right?

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, as a programmer. I hadn't even settled with the fact that just got my first interview. I already had my first job.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: I decided to go in and what really caught me was the culture. I've always had this culture, this ideology of what I want CreativityKills to look like and I literally saw everything right there. It was there, and that was what sold me. Everybody seemed so compact. It was a very good mixture of fun and work and that was literally what made me stay.

Matt Stauffer: That's very cool. And Mark's very young too, right? It's not as if you're-

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, he is.

Matt Stauffer: Joining this kind of giant, pre-existing thing. It was other people with a kind of same young Nigerian "figuring this out as we go" kind of mindset.

Neo Ighodaro: Exactly.

Matt Stauffer: That's awesome. All right, again, I want to ask you an hour of questions about Hotels.ng, but because we're getting close on time, what I want to do is to talk about a few things real quick. First of all, we're going to talk about the Lagos tech scene, because you mentioned about how you looked around there, and it obviously exists, but I would guess that when you first started, there really wasn't much of a tech scene. I want to hear your thoughts on that. I want to hear your thoughts about the Meetup, and then the last thing, I want to hear about hoodies.

Let's start with the Lagos tech scene. When you first started, you said there weren't a lot of people around you that you could look at. There weren't people who you were saying, "That is this person in my town who I want to be like. I identify with that person and I want to be like them," so do you have any thoughts? Did you watch transition happen where all of a sudden, there were other Laravel developers around you and other tech companies? Do you have anything to share with us about what that growth process looked like?

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. When I started, either there was nobody, but they were there, but social media-

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: Wasn't as prevalent as it is now, so I didn't really notice or see anybody. But the first person I did notice was Prosper. I just knew he was making a lot of noise. He's very, very energetic. He can shout, so he's an energetic person, and I kind of noticed him. I was like, "Who is this guy?" He was always saying, "Community, community." What is the community? What is it, exactly?

Matt Stauffer: Right. Right.

Neo Ighodaro: There is no community. I'm not seeing anything. He just kept on going and I was like, "Maybe there is a community after all," and so getting to Hotels.ng kind of gave me a lot of ... because Hotels.ng is kind of a big scene when it comes to tech. We like to support tech a lot, and it kind of gave me ... it's almost like I swallowed something and now my eyes were opened, and I sort of saw that there was potential. There were a lot of people, but there was just no real leadership. People were not just organized, but the people were there. It's just like Lego blocks. They were there, but nobody could put them together.

Matt Stauffer: Got it.

Neo Ighodaro: That was literally how I noticed, and I realized that what Prosper was trying to do was to get people to come together.

Matt Stauffer: Very cool.

Neo Ighodaro: And create that actual community that he was shouting about. That was when I realized that it's possible for us to create something that would kind of unite every single hungry developer, for any developer that's been hungry for knowledge for a while, we can unite them and people could come out and give speeches. Then we did a lot of research on Meetups and conferences. From there on, it has been up, up. I've just been noticing that. People have just been waiting, literally, for someone to start, and once there was that spark, it just happened so quickly. Everybody was, "Meet up here. Meet up here. Meet up here." Right now, as I speak, they're having a G2G Summit and a bunch of others. Next week, I have about ... the entire week is literally booked up.

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

Neo Ighodaro: I have a talk in Android Nigeria and there are a lot of Meetups coming up everywhere.

Matt Stauffer: So, this is all pretty recent?

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, yeah. I would say about three years, two years.

Matt Stauffer: Because I mean, I follow you on Twitter and I see you posting stuff about a Meetup or a conference, it feels like every week, you're at a different place meeting new people. So this is all just a couple years old, then?

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, yeah. Pretty much.

Matt Stauffer: Did I hear you right in saying it's not that that tech scene wasn't there, but it was very kind of individualized, like people were really kind of in their own world? A lot of people probably have a pretty similar story to yours, where people are figuring it out on their own and just recently there was ... Prosper helped. You helped, and probably other folks helped realizing there's a lot of potential if we bring all these people together in one, and all of a sudden, they're exploding. So, I'm seeing you nodding, but I asked you a question. Is that a safe way to say it?

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, yeah. That's literally how it happened.

Matt Stauffer: What do you think the thing that kicked that ... could you point to a single Meetup or a single person or a single event, or were there a lot of them kind of all starting up at the same time?

Neo Ighodaro: I might be wrong, but I would point at ForLoop. There's this Meetup called ForLoop. It was started by Ridwan. I think he was one of the first people that started the entire Meetup thing. I might be wrong again, but it was the one I notice-

Matt Stauffer: Sure, but from your perspective.

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. It was the one I noticed first and it kind of had the ideologies that most Meetup outside the countries have, like you just get a bunch of coders to come to the table and just talk about new tech.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: That was literally my first Meetup, so I was like, "You know what? I want to speak at ForLoop." That was literally my first ever talk, so I spoke on Docker and I was like-

Matt Stauffer: Cool.

Neo Ighodaro:"Let's see how this goes," and it was really successful. I mean, we're having not as much numbers as we have now, because it was just starting out, but that was the first Meetup I've heard of from my own perspective, so I think that was the turning point for everything. I will literally say ForLoop.

Matt Stauffer: Do you remember, when you first spoke at ForLoop, when that was and how many people there were there at that point?

Neo Ighodaro: I'm not too sure about when, but I know the first one I attended, because we hosted it in my office. We used to host Meetups at the Hotels.ng. I think there were about 80, between 50 to 80 people.

Matt Stauffer: Wow.

Neo Ighodaro: To us, that was big numbers. We really thought we-

Matt Stauffer: The Meetups in my local town don't get that many people most of the time and they've been going for years. I mean, and you've noticed people are getting excited about Laravel Nigeria. I mean, part of it is because you never heard of it at all, and then all of a sudden, you've got 400 people and you're running out of space for people to sit. The rapid success that you've seen ... you say you don't remember, but it was at your office, so it had to have been within the last year probably, right?

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, definitely.

Matt Stauffer: Yeah, so this is very, very, very recently. I mean, you went from attending ForLoop the first time with 50 to 80 people. You went from speaking at ForLoop for the first time. You went to helping kind of Prosper and Lynda and others create Laravel Nigeria. For it not existing at all, to all of sudden having hundreds and hundreds of people and running out of space and we're all talking about the span of basically the last 12 months or less. This is a pretty incredible growth process and that's why people, they're saying, "Wait a minute. Where did this all come from?" And that's why I asked the question about the tech scene. It didn't come out of nowhere, but the organization that gave the space for it to be seen and to for it to be brought together seems to really happen quickly, but what it did was it touched on something that's been there for a long time. Right?

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: It's individuals. It's an entrepreneurial spirit. It's the desire to do all these things and the motivation to do it even when you only have 30 minutes at a time, even when you've got rolling power black and stuff like that. There's something. There's a reason where a lot of people keep saying, "Whoa. Keep your eye on Nigeria," so that's ... I mean, again, I could talk a whole hour about that, but I'm trying to keep everything short here. All right, so we talked about the Lagos tech scene a little bit. We talked about the Meetup a little bit. I do want to hear you give a pitch, where if somebody has never heard of Laravel Nigeria, give me a pitch about what it is and I asked you a lot of questions when we first talked about well, where people are coming from and what are your timelines and what are your goals, and all this kind of stuff.

So, tell me a little bit about the Meetup. Tell me a little about where it is right now. When's the next one going to be? What are the things you're excited about? What are the things you're nervous about? What are the difficult and exciting parts about doing it?

Neo Ighodaro: I remember when I thought of Laravel Nigeria initially, it was around December 2016, and I talked to Prosper. That was one of our first few conversations, and I was like, "What would it be like if we had Laravel in Nigeria?" I initially called it, I can't remember the name, but I called it something different. It was like, "You know what? That seems like a good idea. Why don't we do it?" I had zero knowledge on Meetups, like zero. I literally didn't know where to start, and they were like, "Okay." Then we kind of just didn't do it, so January passed. February passed. March, I can't remember when we did the first one, but all of a sudden, I just woke up one morning. I was like, "Let's just do it," and then I called him. I met him at a café, Café Neo, funny enough, so there's a café in Nigeria called Café Neo.

Matt Stauffer: Love it.

Neo Ighodaro: I met him there and I was like, "Guy, we should do this thing, but I want to speak in pidgin." Pidgin is a weird form of English that we speak in Nigeria here.

Matt Stauffer: Really? I had no idea.

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. It's called pidgin English. So, I'm like, "Guy, we could do this thing now." Literally saying, "Guy, let's do this stuff." Then he was like, "Okay. How do we start?" Then I was like, "We should create a Meetup page first." He was like, "Okay," so I tried doing my card and it didn't work, so he did. His card worked, and he created a Meetup page. I created a Twitter page. I started working on the website. Generally, I just noticed people were joining the Meetup page and we hadn't really started talking about it. We just put a couple of things there and say, "We might be hosting a Laravel Nigeria Meetup." Might. That was the word, might.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: Then people were like, "Oh, this is great. This is great. This is great. This is great." The Meetup page was just going higher and I was like, "What is happening?" Then that kind of put pressure on me to actually do the Meetup.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: Because I was kind of nervous that it would fail. I remember telling some of my colleagues at work that, "I don't know if I can actually do this. I mean, it's huge."

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro:"It's a huge thing. I don't have the money to sponsor it, but how would I do it?" Then someone was like, "Just ask for help," and I was like, "That kind of makes sense." The strategy I did was I went to the Laravel source code itself. I was like, "Okay. What companies are generally interested in Laravel?" I mean, that would be the companies that are more likely to support, right?

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: I looked and I saw Pusher. I saw Nexmo and a couple of others. I was like, "Okay. Pusher, Pusher." Then I spoke to ... I think around that period, I just started guest-writing for them, so I messaged someone in their team and she was like, "That sounds great." I was like, "Cool." I didn't really believe it. Of course, she was like, "Yeah, sure."

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: Back then, we had about a hundred people who RSVPed and I was feeling like it wasn't enough, but she was really, really, like, "Oh my God. A hundred?" I was like, "Yeah." Then she was like, "That's huge. We will support." I mean, that's the journey. We started getting people to support the entire thing. We couldn't use Hotels.ng space because 100 people, it wouldn't fit, so we talked to Andela, which is a company that outsources developers to bigger companies and I think Facebook invested in them recently. I talked to them and they were like, "Yeah, sure. Why not? I mean, we're all for the community. Yay," and I was like, "cool."

So, we had that. If I was to tell someone about Laravel Nigeria, I would literally say from my own perspective, it's the belief that you can bring something out of nothing, the belief that you don't have to know about it to be able to do it. You just need to take the first step. Nobody's perfect at anything, and Laravel Nigeria was a shot in the dark, granted, but it was a lot of hard work and that shot paid off. I mean, it might have not paid off, but it did. I wouldn't have known if I didn't try, yeah?

Matt Stauffer: Yeah.

Neo Ighodaro: What we try to do now is tell people, "Hey, talk to everybody. Try and get people in remote communities, because right now Lagos seems like the place where a lot of things are happening."

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro:"We want people from other states. Mobilize your people. Try and get people to attend Meetups." In the past one month or two months, I've attended Meetups in places where I didn't expect people to come. I'm like, "Wow. Okay. Crazy." This is viewed as a state where you're like ... I didn't expect so many people to come out. People were out, and I was like, "It's happening." Laravel Nigeria is literally the belief that there are a lot of people out there. There are a lot of people who want it to happen. There are a lot of people who are hungry for this knowledge, a lot of people who already know, but just need a platform to come out and start speaking. This has given them a lot of them hope and a lot of that platform they need to really come out and be leaders, because that's what we want to create, a lot of leaders that can lead the new generation of developers, basically.

Matt Stauffer: I love it. I've said a thousand times I could talk for another hour. I can't, but I'm going to wrap it up with just three more questions.

Neo Ighodaro: Sure.

Matt Stauffer: Number one: you're a hoodie enthusiast. What makes the perfect hoodie?

Neo Ighodaro: The color black.

Matt Stauffer: I was just going to say, "You're a black hoodie enthusiast." And you walk around with the hood up all the time.

Neo Ighodaro: Every time.

Matt Stauffer: Do you want it to be thick? Do you want it to be thin? Do you want it to be stretchy? Do you want it to be not stretchy? What's the perfect hoodie for you?

Neo Ighodaro: Stretchy. Not thick, because we live in a very hot climate, so not thick. It should really cover my face. I used to be very timid. That's why I fell in love with hoodies. With a hoodie, I felt like nobody sees me. I'm invisible.

Matt Stauffer: Right. You're protected a little.

Neo Ighodaro: Exactly, so it just sort of made me feel very protected. Right now, I don't feel that way, but I've grown to the point where I really love hoodies. I love the ideology behind it. I don't know why, but I'm just attracted to it. It's like that, but it has to be black.

Matt Stauffer: Okay. A thin, black hoodie.

Neo Ighodaro: Yeah.

Matt Stauffer: I got it. That makes sense. Next thing. Has there been one piece of advice or something someone said to you that really has stuck with you across your career?

Neo Ighodaro: Not really, but remember my mom, so there was this period and she probably wouldn't even remember saying it. The period when we had these hardships and people didn't understand what I was doing and my family was wilding out and everything. She called me and she told me. She has this habit of waking me up by 3:00 AM if she wants to discuss some very specific stuff and then she woke me by 3:00 AM. I was sleepy-eyed and she was like, "I don't know what you are doing, but if that's what you want to do, then do it." I was like, "Okay," and I went back to bed.

Matt Stauffer: Right.

Neo Ighodaro: But literally ever time I decide to do something, I just remember that point like, "If it's what you want to do, just do it. Literally, just start," so every single thing I've done ever since has just been with that thing in mind. "Just do it." Excuse me. It really can be difficult, but you would never know if you don't do it, so I think that would be the one watch word that I always ... if I want to pick up a new programming language, just do it. Just start.

Matt Stauffer: I love it. And the one last thing is, is there one part of your story, one part of what has gotten you from 13 years old, first walking into a cybercafe, between there and here where you say ... and obviously, there's many of these moments, where you say, "If that thing hadn't happened, if that person hadn't done that thing or if I hadn't tried that one thing or if I hadn't whatever, I'd be in a completely different place now." Is there one really kind of significant thing that you really reflect on often?

Neo Ighodaro: Yes. I would say it was the bullies, strangely enough. I think-

Matt Stauffer: Wow. Tell me more.

Neo Ighodaro: If I wasn't bullied in school, I probably would have just been ... because, like I said, I was very book smart. I probably would have studied something very differently probably, but the bullies just kind of forced me to move away a little and have some sort of new passion. Back then, I really didn't have any passion. I was more of an introvert, so I didn't really have any passion. I just liked sitting at home reading books, so I think that point was a big turning point, even if I didn't realize it then, but it was a huge turning point in everything.

Matt Stauffer: Man, that's amazing. I mean, not amazing that you were bullied, but amazing how that could be redeemed and turned into the whole story that you just told me. I've got to make another podcast so I can talk to you for longer or something. I don't even know, but this has been amazing. I really appreciate your time and for sharing with us. I really am thankful for your contributions to the Laravel community. We all benefit from it, and before we cut for the day, is there anything you want to tell people or anything you want them to know about or anything like that, or do you feel like we've covered everything here today?

Neo Ighodaro: I would say we have pretty much covered a lot of stuff, but-

Neo Ighodaro: That are probably going to listen to this, I think a lot of people keep asking me like, "Oh, how were you able to this? How were you able to do that?" It's really not that difficult if you think about it. I mean, there are going to be challenges every single time. I tell them, "If you have something and you didn't have to work for it, you will not appreciate it. There will be challenges, but in hindsight, when you think about the challenges, they might not be as big as you are making them seem. Yes, we don't have a lot of power in Nigeria, but I mean, there are other ways around it. You could probably get a generator or you could ... I mean, just in whatever way you want to, try and feed your imagination. It doesn't only apply to coding. It could be anything, literally. I feel like anybody can be anything they want, you just need to get yourself out of the way first."

Matt Stauffer: That's beautiful. Is there anything in pidgin that all your friends from Nigeria would totally flip out if they heard you say as the last words of the Laravel Podcast? Because if there is, say it, and that'll be the end.

Neo Ighodaro: Let me see. Now don't listen to Laravel Nigeria. Now don't hear the podcast from Matt Stauffer, so as [inaudible 01:03:41], anything is possible. I was literally nothing before, but now that that they see me, I'm on Laravel Podcast and it's been a dream. I'm really grateful for it, and I appreciate it. So, thank you.

Matt Stauffer: I love it. Thank you so much for your time, Neo.

Neo Ighodaro: All right. Thank you very much.

]]>
Sat, 23 Sep 2017 15:26:00 +0000matt@mattstauffer.co (Matt Staufger)Matt Staufger01:04:16An interview with Neo Ighodaro, co-founder of Laravel Nigeria and CTO of hotels.ng
An interview with Neo Ighodaro, co-founder of Laravel Nigeria and CTO of hotels.ng
Laravel, Nigeria, PHPnofull33Interview: Taylor Otwell, creator of Laravel2d30f371-e50e-421b-977c-30e502c42c78http://www.laravelpodcast.com/c7807d42
An interview with Taylor Otwell, creator of Laravel, about what he did before Laravel and what got him started.
An interview with Taylor Otwell, creator of Laravel, about what he did before Laravel and what got him started.

Matt Stauffer : Welcome to the Laravel Podcast, episode 55, in which I talk to Laravel creator Taylor Otwell. We learn about his back story, where he came from, and what helped him—and made him—start Laravel in the first place. Stay tuned.

Taylor, it's great to have you on season three of the Laravel podcast. Obviously you've been around since the very beginning, but we're doing a little switch up here, where I'm going to start doing interviews. So, I'm super excited to have you as the first person whose brain I get to pick here. So, I guess we can start with ... Say hi to the people.

Taylor Otwell : Hey people. Hey party people.

Matt Stauffer : Ha. Party people. What we're going to do here for today, and I told you this beforehand, but I feel like a lot of people have talked to you about Laravel, about development, about the latest version. Every time a new version comes out, 5.5 just came out, people want to talk about that. And maybe we'll cover that a little bit, but what I feel like we haven't talked about quite as much is, the man behind the scenes, kind of thing. I think there's a lot about you that people don't know, so I first started with the questions ... I've known you for years now. I feel like I know you really well and there's still certain things I don't know about your past, but then I also asked a few folks, "What are some things you really want to know about Taylor and how he works?" So, we're just going to off-the-cuff, just throw some of those questions at you and see where it goes. Sound good?

Taylor Otwell : Sounds good.

Matt Stauffer : Awesome. So, first of all, back to the early days, when did you first have a computer in your home? Taylor Otwell : I think I was about ten or eleven, I had a computer. 66-megahertz computer that our neighbor actually, I think had, had it built of us, because our neighbor was a computer programmer, across the street. And this was back in the early days of Windows.

Matt Stauffer : Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Taylor Otwell : I guess it was like Windows 3.1 or something like that.

Matt Stauffer : Yeah.

Taylor Otwell : He was an early Windows programmer. And my parents had, I think asked him to help them get a computer for us. And it had a little megahertz readout on the front of the screen ... or on the front of the tower I guess. And was like Windows 95.

Matt Stauffer : I'm always interested to hear from people what role, kind of early access and interest in computers has for them. So you having that neighbor, was it your neighbor that sparked your interest or was it having that computer? What was it that really sparked your interest in computers when you first got into them?

Taylor Otwell : You know, it's hard to say, I don't think it was necessarily the neighbor that sparked the interest. I'm not sure I even realized that my neighbor was a programmer until later. I think I was just always interested in sci-fi type stuff and geeky stuff. Of course, I always liked Star Wars. I liked The Jetsons cartoon when I was a kid and all the cool tech stuff they had, so I guess I was just always drawn to futuristic tech stuff, so it was natural to be into computers. My first dabbling in programming was just playing HTML, where I would make little websites about the games I liked, like Pokemon or whatever other games I was playing at the time. Just little tips and strategy site. I remember one of the first ones I ever made actually, which was on CompuServe. And our neighbor, that same neighbor helped me and his son put it on CompuServe, was a website about Civilization 2, and sort of our strategies for that game.

Matt Stauffer : Yes. What's the oldest website that you still have access to? Do you know?

Taylor Otwell : I don't have anything from my childhood unfortunately. I wish I did. I wish I had thought to take screenshots of them and stuff. But a lot of them ... Several of them were on GeoCities and other free sites like that.

Matt Stauffer : I remember my GeoCities sites. The only thing that I remember is the first one that I ever built, I hosted on GeoCities and it had a single image in it because image tags were pretty new at that point. So it was basically like text about me and a giant picture with a page scroll on the corner of the picture because the page scroll was the hottest Photoshop effect or whatever.

Taylor Otwell : Yeah. I always thought the counters were really cool too. That you could put on your stuff.

Matt Stauffer : Oh, my God, yeah. I was listening to somebody's podcast recently, I don't know who it was and the guy who had originally created link exchange was on there. Did you ever do those?

Taylor Otwell : Yeah. I remember those. Those were big especially in the Pokemon website world.

Matt Stauffer : Right? Yeah. We were all just waiting for one of those big sites to get a link over to us because of how the link exchange rule played. So it sounds like HTML is where you go started, do you ever do any, I don't know what the right term is like coding, coding, like a basic or anything like that early on, or was it not till later.

Taylor Otwell : Yeah, I wrote few basic things. I also got really into TI-83 calculator programs where I would write little strategy games. Back then, at least in like middle school and high school the popular thing was like that drug wars game.

Matt Stauffer : I was just going to say drug wars, that was it.

Taylor Otwell : I would write games like that, either with drugs or with other lemonade stand type games. And I learned how to do that basically like sitting in ninth grade English, I just kind of taught myself how to program the calculator. Those were really the first real programs I wrote, I feel like.

Matt Stauffer : When was your first exposure to the Internet that you remember? Taylor Otwell : We had internet pretty early after I got my first computer. We had dial up Internet. Just like at 14 4 modem. That was my first exposure to the internet. I don't even remember what sites were really a thing back then. I remember mainly looking at video game sites and just like Yahoo, and stuff like that.

Matt Stauffer : When you were thinking, then, about coding ... I think a lot of us we were just kind of figuring it out as we went. Did you think, "Man, this is what I want to do forever," or was it just a fun thing and you were still ... did you have a different plan for your life at that point?

Taylor Otwell : I actually did not plan to do coding, even when I entered college, I was doing my degree in computer networking and stuff because I thought programming would be too mathematical and sort of boring.

Matt Stauffer : Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Taylor Otwell : But I didn't really have a good understanding of what real programming was like, on a professional level. I'm not sure if schools back then, even in college ... I'm not sure I really got a good picture of what actual, on-the-job programming is like. I always imagined it to be so theoretical and really hard, like calculus all the time and stuff like that. But it really, at least for the kind of programming we do on the web, it doesn't tend to be that way.

I went through all of college not planning to even be a programmer.

Matt Stauffer : Did you do well ... I hope you don't mind me asking ... did you do well in math in high school, did you take calculus and everything?

Taylor Otwell : Yeah, I was always like a B student in math.

Matt Stauffer : Okay.

Taylor Otwell : I was just okay.

Matt Stauffer : Right.

Taylor Otwell : I wasn't exceptional.

Matt Stauffer : Not enough that the idea of programming being very "mathy" made you excited about it.

Taylor Otwell : Yeah, exactly.

Matt Stauffer : Okay. Did you ... like a different tact ... did you always consider yourself someone who's gonna do entrepreneurial stuff? At what point did you start thinking of yourself as, "I'm someone who's going to start a business"?

Taylor Otwell : Only a few years after I'd gotten out of college and had a taste of the fact that anyone could take PHP and build an entire web application, which I didn't really realize, I guess, at the time that that was pretty possible for someone to do. Once I realized that, my brain just started churning with different ideas, and even if it wasn't something I could do full-time, but just something small to supplement my income or whatever. I was probably two or three years out of college before I really started thinking that way, though.

Matt Stauffer : What was your first exposure to PHP that led you to having that experience?

Taylor Otwell : My very first exposure was in college itself. We had a class project, it was a group project with two other people, and we had to build an inventory tracking system for a local charity. This was our final senior thing. We were all assigned real-world projects in the community, and so we happened to get this inventory tracking thing. One of the guys in the group was familiar with PHP, apparently, and said, "We can use PHP for this, because it's pretty easy," and I didn't really know any better, so I was like, "Sure, sounds good." That's when I really got my first exposure to PHP, even though I, on that project, mainly did talking with the customer, and finding out how they needed it to work, and stuff like that.

Later, a couple of years down the road, when I started having ideas for side projects and stuff, I had remembered that he had chosen PHP back a couple of years ago in that class project. It was supposed to be easy or whatever, and I knew that we were able to lush the projects, so it wasn't too hard, apparently.

Matt Stauffer : Were you ...

Taylor Otwell : Yeah, so that's when I revisited PHP, because I hadn't actually used it very much in college. My partner had chosen it as our programming language for that project.

Matt Stauffer : In college, when he chose that, were you doing .NET at that point, or did you get into it out of college?

Taylor Otwell : No, I only did .NET once I got hired at my first actual programming job. The only programming courses I took in college were two semesters of C++, and that was it, actually I had those two semesters of programming, again, because I was in a networking degree, so I didn't have a lot of programming classes, like a pure computer science major might have.

Matt Stauffer : Right. I think I remember you told me that the .NET thing was an intentional, learning-the-job-type situation?

Taylor Otwell : Yeah.

Matt Stauffer : What was that experience like?

Taylor Otwell : Yeah, so, the place that hired me right out of college, they came to my university, which was Arkansas Tech. They were just interviewing students, and since they were there, I just decided to do an interview, even though I hadn't planned on being a programmer. I did the interview, and got the job, and the immediately put you in this six-month training program, where basically, for the first six months of the job, you spend most of your time in class, especially for the first three months, and then for the remaining three months, it's like 50-50 in class, and doing little projects and stuff.

They actually taught me basically all of classic ASP, COBOL, JCL, which are two old things, and some beginnings of .NET, but not a ton of it. I did a lot of COBOL and classic ASP, and then eventually got put on a .NET project at work. I just picked that up from the existing code that was already written on the project, because I wasn't writing it from scratch at first. I just taught myself .NET as I got in there, because I already had been programming for a couple of years, so picking up another language was not too difficult, since they actually wrote in VB.NET, and all of their classic ASP was in VB, so ...

Matt Stauffer : Right. The syntax was really similar.

Taylor Otwell : Wasn't too bad.

Matt Stauffer : That actually ... I wanted to ask about .NET and VC, but stepping back for a second, when you guys were writing PHP in school, was this classic PHP, was this ... I'm assuming it was 5-3, based on what I've talked to you about before, right? Was there any framework or anything?

Taylor Otwell : No, there was no framework on that project that I remember. It was just classic ... from what I remember, because I actually had to put it all in a thumb drive and install it at this charity, it was just a bunch of random PHP files. There was no real structure to it.

Matt Stauffer : Index.php, about.php ...

Taylor Otwell : All the ... I remember looking at the HTML and all the PHP being mixed in.

Matt Stauffer : Yeah. You got your SQL queries up top, and then the end bracket, and then, all of a sudden, your HTML.

Taylor Otwell : Yeah. But then, when I came back to PHP later, it was on PHP 5.3. But again, I started with plain PHP for a few weeks, and then quickly realized that I needed some structure, and that's when I used CodeIgniter for a little bit.

Matt Stauffer : Okay. Now, when you were doing .NET, was it .MVC at that point, or was it some predecessor?

Taylor Otwell : I've done both. I've done .NET webforms, which were a predecessor to .MVC, and later, I did .MVC, the early versions.

Matt Stauffer : I have experience with webforms, and I've never got my brain around the way it works, because if I remember right, it's basically ... rather than a route or a controller, or anything, it's really basically a form that handles its own validation, that handles its own everything. Everything is centered around this form, and then that form, and then that form. It's just a very different mental model, in my ... I know that's not a great description, but am I right in remembering that that's the difference between that versus .MVC?

Taylor Otwell : Yeah. I think what they did, is they took WinForms, which is what we used to write desktop apps. On WinForms, how it works, if you want to do some action on a button-click, when they click on a button on your desktop app, you're literally in, the designer can click the button, and it takes you to the spot in the code that's like a click-event handler, and you write all of your code. I think on webforms, they tried to have ... basically, their thought process was, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could make the same model for the web, so that all these WinForms programmers can write these dynamic web applications, so you have the same thing, where you have button-click handlers in your .NET code that correspond to things on your front end."

Somehow, they routed that using ... I don't know if it was query strings, or what they were actually passing in the form, but somehow, they were able to route that to the right piece of code when you clicked a button on your web front end. It felt like building a WinForms app, and was really different than any other web technology I've ever used since.

Matt Stauffer : Yeah. The reason I was asking is, my brother has done .MVC for ages, and he helped me understand .MVC when I first got into CodeIgniter, but I remember having written webforms before that, and it's such a complete ... it felt a little bit like writing a classic ASP, especially if you're using VB, but then it felt a little bit like some kind of super-powered jQuery, basically. It's not like a mentality that I'm used to seeing anywhere else. Before you got back into CodeIgniter, you had had some experience with .MVC, then.

Taylor Otwell : Yeah. I had .MVC, and that's why I even knew the frameworks as a concept to look for, basically.

Matt Stauffer : So, you got a job out of school. It almost seems like it was a sponsored boot camp, basically, for the first six months. Is that a good way to think about it? There are getting used to real-world stuff, but you're actually sitting in classes sponsored by the company?

Taylor Otwell : Yeah, a little bit. It was all on site, and all the instructors were full-time employees that actually were in other departments, actually. They would just pull them into these training classes when they needed them. But it was a really unique place. They only hired new graduates, and everyone goes through the same training program. It's like they just want people fresh, and wanted to sort of train them in their way of doing things, rather than bring in existing programmers that are already, I guess, ingrained with other ways.

Matt Stauffer : Right. That you have to un-train, basically.

Taylor Otwell : Yeah, it was one of the of the ... I guess, the only places I've worked that only hired new graduates.

Matt Stauffer : Interesting. So, you're doing that, you're working at .MVC, and you have this idea that you want to do some side projects, and you mention that seeing your partner in that class project using PHP gave you a little of the idea that you could do something on your own. Can you tell me a little bit more about what the mentality was, and what the thought process was, that led for you to have a good, paying job doing .MVC, that you could do that for quite a while, and saying, "You know what? I want to do something on the side." What was the itch there?

Taylor Otwell : I think part of it was having freedom to move wherever I wanted to if it did take off. Then, I could work from home, and we could move back closer to family, because at the time, I was living three or four hours away from the main bulk of my family, which lives in one town. It was just gonna be more freedom is what I remember to live wherever we wanted to.

Matt Stauffer : Yeah. You wanted that freedom, you wanted to be able to be self-employed. If it's anything like it was for me, and then you can tell me if I'm wrong, that there wasn't quite as significant of a culture around being an entrepreneur. It feels like there is, today ... there wasn't all these conferences about being a sole entrepreneur. I guess hearing Ian and Andre talk about it, they're definitely ... what's that form they're always talking about? Business and Software?

Taylor Otwell : Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Matt Stauffer : But I don't know about you ... have you ever heard of any of those folks who are really big about doing your little business, or is it just something where you said, "Well, I want to do this, and I'll figure it out as I go."

Taylor Otwell : No, I didn't know anyone else doing anything like that. I didn't even go to any websites that talked about that or anything.

Matt Stauffer : Yeah, same here. I'm interested ... let's see if anything will come up during this chat ... whether the lack of those resources help to hurt us in various ways. You knew PHP was an option. You knew that you could ship with PHP. You at least had the ability to compare it against some other web-based programming things, and it seemed like PHP was more viable for getting something launched, working solo, and so you dug into PHP, you did a little bit of old-school procedural PHP, quickly realized you wanted to do CodeIgniter. What was the first project, do you remember, that you built with CodeIgniter?

Taylor Otwell : One of the first projects I built was this really niche thing. I had known someone that owned a book bindery, they rebind old books, and I was going to build a little system for them to take orders and keep track of orders of books they were rebinding. It was a very specific product for this company. I think they were based in Tulsa or something at the time, pretty close to where I was living, really.

Matt Stauffer : You built an app custom for them, you built it in CodeIgniter ... what was hosting like? What was the front end like? Do you remember any of the other technical details of what that was like?

Taylor Otwell : I think I used DreamHost at the time, so it was just a shared host, because I didn't really know how to configure my own VPS until years later, basically. Yeah, I know I was on DreamHost, and would FTP the files using FileZilla, because I was on Windows at the time, and actually, I didn't even have a Mac until I started working for UserScape after Laravel had been built. All of Laravel, the first version, was built on a cheap Windows laptop. I would just FTP all the files up. When I first started, I was using Notepad++.

Matt Stauffer : Yeah, man, I love Notepad++. A lot of good work done with Notepad++ and FileZilla. You were doing that, and at some point, you felt like ... well, actually, I was gonna say, at some point, you felt like CodeIgniter wasn't giving you what you wanted, but actually, the reason you and I first interacted was because I was a CodeIgniter developer who had started learning about IOC and DI, and stuff like that, and I said, "What I wanted was an IOC container for CodeIgniter," and this guy Taylor, this young guy, had written an IOC container for CodeIgniter, and I couldn't find the code anywhere."

I ended up DMing you or something, and you ended up saying, "You know what I just pulled ... I got rid of it, I pulled it in Laravel, you should check out Laravel." That was basically how I first my Laravel. I followed Jeffrey at Nettuts for a while, and he'd been talking about Laravel for a bit, so that was what finally switched me over. It sounds like before you went off on your own to do your own thing, you were trying to work in the CodeIgniter ecosystem to improve it. What was that like?

Taylor Otwell : Yeah, so at first, I had no intentions of splitting off and writing a framework. But you're right, one of the first projects I wrote was CI injector, CInject or something like that. I was actually pretty proud of that. It was actually the first reflection-based IOC container in PHP at all that I'm aware of. There was one other IOC container that was also written in 2010, a few months later. That was one of the main pieces of .NET/.MVC that I really like was the auto-resolving container. Laravel's container still works, basically, like that first CodeIgniter container did. The other thing I was really interested in was the better ORM for CodeIgniter, and I wanted to get those two things in ... oh, there was a third thing.

I wanted better templating, like Blade, where you have an @extends at the top, and then you define these sections that override the parent template section, stuff like that. Template inheritance. I remember the final straw, that I couldn't really continue with CodeIgniter anymore, is I wanted auto-resolving dependency injection in my CodeIgniter controllers. To make that work, you really had to start editing the core files in a way that was not in a nice, packageable, shippable way, where other people could do it. Then I hit this crossroads, where I considered just forking CodeIgniter, and making this "special edition" of just sort of souped-up CodeIgniter on steroids, and giving it another name. Or just starting fresh. I think I just started fresh to just experiment at first, and then got so far along, I just kept going. I know I rewrote the first version of Laravel, probably a solid five or six times until I was happy with it.

Matt Stauffer : What was the first thing you wrote in Laravel?

Taylor Otwell : I remember writing the routing engine first. Probably the routing and the views. I think ... I don't remember exactly what I was doing for the database at the time. There was an active record of implementation called PHP ActiveRecord, that even at that time had become abandonware. That was back in 2010. Then, there was another couple of libraries. One was called Idiorm ... it was I-D-I-O-R-M, and then it had a corresponding ORM called "Paris". I think the Idiorm thing was the query builder, Paris was the ORM. Actually, Eloquent was very inspired by Paris, because it had the sort of model where a relationship is just a function of the model that returns a query builder. Eloquent, of course, still works like that to this day, so Paris deserves quite a bit of credit for coming up with that model. I don't think the person who wrote Paris even programs PHP anymore, last time I looked, but I'm not sure they're aware that Eloquent was so inspired by that.

Matt Stauffer : That's really cool. I remember the moment where I realized I had to leave CodeIgniter was when I recognized that some of its inherent restrictions were forcing me into writing worse code. For example, some of the ugliest stuff in my old CodeIgniter apps were because I had ... database models, they called it, which was really like it was a model and repository and three other things, but you cram it all into one, and so you have methods that are everything you could just possibly imagine that would touch the database in any way, would all get crammed into a single class. If you're lucky, you've figured out enough to at least differentiate those classes by table.

But that wasn't even always the case. Like you said, without view inheritance, you end up loading views and data in every controller and passing them around to each other, and you've got a single variable that you're passing through your controller method that tracks the data that's eventually going to get past the view. There's just a lot of things, because of the constraints of CodeIgniter, you just wrote worse code. When you started doing Laravel, you wanted to be able to do dependency injection and all these things. How much of your mindset was, "I'm gonna write things that are gonna make people write better code," and how much of it was, "I want to do these things, and I can't do these things." Was it a purity concept? Was it an ease-of-use concept, or were those things all tied together?

Taylor Otwell : At first, I feel like it was a lot of ease-of-use, but also, there was some purity mixed in as well, because of the whole dependency injection thing, which I considered a more pure approach to doing some things back then, and of course still is a more pure approach a lot of times now. I feel like ... but also, ease of use was huge, too, because I wanted it to be very Apple-esque, where it was just really nice to use out of the box, and you didn't have to do all these hacks and customizations to get it really nice that I had to do with CodeIgniter. I wanted it to be like when you unwrap Laravel, it was this nice package that you could use, it was all cohesive and coherent.

Matt Stauffer : Yeah. I want to talk a little bit further on that for a little bit. One of the things that you've talked about since the early days is that you recognize that the documentation in the community just make a really big impact on people's experience, working with the framework of a library. You've reference the fact that CodeIgniter was so successful, in large part because it had great documentation. For starters, what do you think it is that prepared you to be in a place where you could recognize that? Is it because you hadn't trained to be a programmer, or are there other experiences in your life that made you more sensitive to those types of, or do you even have a sense for what that is?

Taylor Otwell : I don't know. I feel like it was just a low tolerance for pain in terms of programming, because programming wasn't a hobby for me, even really back then. I didn't come home and program, I did other stuff. To have a painful experience programming wasn't that great for me, because it wasn't something I was particularly obsessed about, and so if I was gonna do it at all, I wanted it to be really enjoyable, and easy to do, and fun. I just had a really low threshold for any pain points in the tools I was using, I think.

Matt Stauffer : Yeah. It's like we always joke about the fact that a lazy programmer is a good programmer because they're gonna do the one that doesn't waste time or whatever else it ends up being, so I hear that.

Taylor Otwell : Yeah, and even when I was at my .NET job, I had already discovered that I really enjoyed writing tools that helped programmers be more productive, because I remember one of the things I did there in my free time, when I had a few extra minutes, was I wrote this little program called WeDev in .NET that was like ... the closest thing I can think of, it would be a lot worse version of Slack, but it had a file dropbox where we could drop files to each other, and it had a little status indicator of what you were doing then, so it was like our own little instant messenger with a file share thing. But I really loved that project, so that was my first taste of, "Hey, I really enjoyed making developers' lives easier." I think that was part of what drew me into Laravel, was it became this fun project to see how productive I could make a programming environment.

Matt Stauffer : Yeah, I like that. One of the things that really struck me when I first started going to Laravel conferences was how many people told stories about the ways that Laravel had changed their lives. That was something I wasn't used to. I think people ... there's some jokes around that the terms of "artisan" and some of the other terms we use in the Laravel world, but it's reflective of a really different approach for what the priorities and values are coming from Laravel.

What's the goal? That's the question I was asking about purity versus ease of use, it seems like developer happiness is really a very significant ... like productivity and happiness are really significant goals that you have there. When you were building Laravel, you started out, you wanted to scratch your own itch. You wanted to make something that was good for you and it made you be able to do things a certain way, but you were relatively public about it. You started showing people. At what point did you start to realize this is something people are responding to? This is something that might really be a big player in the post-CodeIgniter framework world.

Taylor Otwell : I think when I was pretty far along and had, basically, a finished product, only then did I really decide that I would go all the way and document it. I knew that the documentation would be huge, because I felt like that was why CodeIgniter was even popular to begin with, because there was Kohana, which was another, CodeIgniteresque-type framework that had some advantages, and had some better features, but the documentation was so much worse that it just never really had the same steam that CodeIgniter had.

I had picked up on that pretty early that if I wanted Laravel to be popular, I would have to write really good documentation. I tried to write, basically, CodeIgniter-level documentation from the very first 1.0 release, because I've seen a lot of people put stuff out there, and then looks like, "Documentation coming soon," or "Documentation in progress," and it's never gonna get the same reception as if it's a finished product. I thought I had a pretty productive little thing, and decided, "Hey, I'll go ahead and document it and put it out there, and see what the response is." My mentality at the time was, "Even if nobody else ever uses this, then that's fine with me, because I at least have something enjoyable to use when I write PHP."

Matt Stauffer : Are there any people or moments or inflection points or whatever where you point to a thing and said, "If that thing hadn't happened, or that moment hadn't happened, it would have been a completely different story"?

Taylor Otwell : Yeah, so there's a couple of moments. A big moment was, there was a point where a few PHP programmers were teaming up to make this PHP framework called "Fuel", and it was a few CodeIgniter people like Phil Sturgeon, and Dan Horrigan, and one other guy, I think, one or two other guys. I think they were trying to build the successor to CodeIgniter that was moving faster and had features that people wanted, and stuff like that. They had some pretty decent marketing pages for it, and stuff like that. I remember I had some ideas ... I was actually excited about Fuel, and had some ideas that I wanted to put into Fuel. I can't remember what they exactly were at the time.

I think one of them might have been some type of route filter-type thing that ended up being in Laravel, or something like that. I had messaged one of them and said, "Hey, I'd really like to help out on Fuel. This is the feature I want to add, or whatever." They weren't super-interested in the feature, which is fine. It's not a knock on them, they just weren't interested in it. I was like, "Okay, I guess I'll keep working on Laravel," but if they would have bit on that, and been interested in me helping with Fuel a little bit and some of these things, then of course, I think things could have been really different, because I would have jumped into Fuel and started adding stuff there, and probably would have just started using it, and become invested in it.

That's one moment. Probably the biggest moment I can think of where things could have taken a really different direction because that feature wasn't really a fit for them, that I just kept working on Laravel.

Matt Stauffer : Yeah. Well, I, for one, am grateful to whoever it was that rejected that feature. I think ... it's not to say that something else wouldn't have come along, but I think your life would have looked a little bit different after that point, so I think it's a good time to ask a couple questions about what's your life like today. When you were working full-time ... I assume it's at least a 40-hour work week .NET job, and you were writing Laravel on the side ... do you have a sense for what your hours a week were looking like between day job and Laravel work?

Taylor Otwell : Yeah. I seemed to have a lot of energy back then. I worked eight to five, and then I came home. James, our first child, was pretty young at the time, just basically a baby, when I'd first started working on it. I would hang out with the family from five to nine. We were just in a little two-bedroom apartment, it was 900 square feet. We were all in there together, pretty close. Abigail would go to bed around nine or 9:30, and I would actually stay up until one or 1:30, a lot of the time. Going to bed at midnight, for me, was like, "I'm going to feel great tomorrow, I went to bed at midnight."

I would stay up until midnight, one, sometimes two, the majority of nights, really, and work on Laravel. I was putting in, let's see, probably three to four hours of Laravel work every night, and somehow felt pretty good, actually. I can't really seem to do that anymore. I don't know what changed, but ...

Matt Stauffer : Yeah. When my wife was pregnant, she would go to bed at 9:00 every night. I was not happy with my day job situation, and that's when I wrote my first softwares and service. I was working 90, 100-hour work weeks between my normal job and that. It's the same thing. There's no way I could do that right now. But I'm glad I did it then, back when I had that energy.

Taylor Otwell : Even when I wrote Forge, I was still working at UserScape, and would stay up until midnight or one routinely, because that took six months for me to build just in my free time.

Matt Stauffer : Yeah. At some point, you had Laravel to a point ... I don't want to go too deep in this story, because it's been told before, so I want to cover things I haven't, but you got to a point where Laravel was good enough that it attracted Ian's attention. He was looking to do a reboot of UserScape, which was handled PHP from scratch, and he pick Laravel, and he hired you, and said, "Hey, you build this thing out, and you can make Laravel better, so it can support our needs." You would add a lot of features that UserScape needed, and that helped Laravel grow up in a lot of ways. You told that story. I think the interesting aspect that hasn't been covered before, is what the shift from being UserScape plus Laravel to solo Laravel look like. What were some of the things that you were thinking about when you were starting to make that decision ... when you were starting to consider going out on your own, what was scary, what was exciting, what considerations did you have before you decided to go solo?

Taylor Otwell : Some of the scary parts were just not knowing how much longevity Laravel, as the ecosystem, would have, because ... Forge was out, and was doing well, and I was actually making more on Forge than I was making at UserScape pretty quickly. But Laravel was still relatively new. It was only three years old when Forge came out, so there was questions. What if everyone stops using Laravel? What if a better framework comes out in six months and everyone's like, "Screw Laravel, screw Forge, I'm using whatever." That was one of the main fears. The exciting part was that I would just have so much time to work on Laravel. At the time, it was just unfathomable if you know how much time that would be, because 40 hours a week on Laravel. If I'm working just two or three hours of my free time at night, it's two weeks worth of free time. I could try stuff faster, I could experiment faster. That was the most exciting part for me.

Matt Stauffer : Yeah, that's cool. I remember talking to you during that time where, to me, it seemed obvious because I have a similar story where I did DreamHost, but I was running a softwares and service from 2010, 2011. I needed a VPS, and I tried managing my own Linode VPSes, and it was just awful. I wasn't trained in that stuff. I ended up paying for these super-constrained hosts that didn't let you do what CodeIgniter and Laravel needed, because nothing like Forge was out there, and I just couldn't afford from my SaaS to pay a DevOps person to handle it. When Forge came along ... I don't want to be bombastic, but it really revolutionized individual developers' and small teams' ability to run fully-robust VPSes without having full-time DevOps people. For me, as someone from the outside, first of all, I said, "Please let us pay you more money," but second of all, I knew that was really gonna sustain. But I know that there were times where it was a little bit scary.

Within your realm of comfort ... I don't want you to have to say your deepest, darkest secrets, but what does make you nervous today? Are you worried about some other framework? Are you worried about PHP no longer being viable? Are you just feeling pretty good? What does ... in the life that you have, where Laravel is very popular, very stable, what's on your horizon?

Taylor Otwell : Nothing makes me too nervous anymore, because even if Laravel started dying today, and died a slow death over the next few years, I would have secured my future at this point, in terms of "I'm gonna be able to retire with my family, the kids' college is paid for, and I don't have to worry about those things anymore." I would just be like, "Okay, great, thanks for the memories," and I would apply to work at Tighten, I guess.

Matt Stauffer : I know, I love it, yes, I'm sold.

Taylor Otwell : I would have to just go back to being a regular guy programmer, working on projects and stuff, but I don't know. It doesn't make me too nervous, because I always try to have this mentality that Laravel, obviously, will not be a thing anymore, that either because PHP's not a thing anymore or there's some other framework that's better or whatever. I don't know how long that will be, but I don't really get too nervous about it, because I feel happy with what I created, the memories I made, what I did for my family for decades to come, basically. If it all ended tomorrow, I would be fine. It would be a fun ride.

Matt Stauffer : I love it, and that's really good. I think that makes me so happy I want to touch two other things, and then we might just cut it short. The two other things are in that same direction, about what makes you happy and what gives you peace outside of programming. I think the first question is, do you have any daily practices or any mantras, or any things that you do to center yourself, and just help you handle life when it's stressful or not? Just things to keep you steady, I guess.

Taylor Otwell : Yeah, I try to meditate some. I can't say I do it every day, but every other day at least, let's say, I try to meditate. For me, that's a spiritual thing, but for other people, it might not be. It might be more just a "focus your thoughts" kind of thing. Also, just try to keep life and perspective during that meditation, I guess. Try to think some of those things ... same thoughts where I don't want to hold too tightly on the success of Laravel, or being a popular programmer is core to my identity, because I think that's setting yourself up for a lot of pain in the future, because all things pass away eventually. It's just a time to focus my thoughts.

Also, I just think about my family, stuff like that. More important stuff than programming. But I find it just de-stresses me a bit, helps me focus on what's important, and it's refreshing. But now I try to make time to do it. I feel like as soon as we get up in the morning, now with two kids, it's sort of rushing around everywhere getting ready for school and stuff like that. But yeah, that's what I do.

Matt Stauffer : Yeah. You got to be intentional about those things. You've talked about productivity systems and how much you love Wunderlist and stuff. How structured do you keep your life? Do you have, "This is the hour when I do that"? I remember you've talked about starting with pull requests and issues. Do you still have some of those same structures, or is it different with Mohamed around?

Taylor Otwell : Yeah, I still have some structures. It's not structured to the point that every hour of the day is structured. I'm more focused in day increments moreso than hour increments in Todoist, which is what I moved to after Wunderlist, which I'm really enjoying, actually. I have this bullet journal approach, where I only really sit in the "Today" column of Todoist, and I have, usually, five or six things that I want to do that day, and I have them in Todoist, and then I have projects that I treat just as grab-bags, the things I want to do at some point.

Some of my projects in Todoist are actual projects that I'm working on, like Laravel Horizon was, where I have all the things I want to do. But some of them are just movies I want to watch, or music I want to listen to, or something like that. I do keep my day fairly structured, where I start my day with port request and emails, but then after that, it's not so structured. I just work through my to-do list for that day as I ... just whatever I feel like doing next. But it's still structured at a daily level.

Matt Stauffer : Right. In regards to the music that you're gonna listen to ... I'm not gonna ask you to tell me the best rap album of all time, because we could do a whole podcast on that, but do you have one that, even if it's not your favorite today, has been the longest-running favorite, or the most significant impact, just the one that you played out like no other album or something.

Taylor Otwell : I feel like I go in phases, and it's funny because each Laravel release, I feel like, has had an album that I feel like I really played a lot for that release. I know on one of the releases, I played the Views album that Drake put out quite a bit. One of the releases was "The Life of Pablo" from Kanye West. But I think one of the albums recently that I really played a lot was ... I think you pronounce his name "Black" even though it's spelled with a six on the front, so "6lack" is what it looks like. He's a rapper/singer hybrid, I guess you could say, almost more singer than rapper, but I played that album a lot when it first came out, and still play it quite a bit.

Matt Stauffer : All right. Did you like 808s and Heartbreak?

Taylor Otwell : Yeah, I really like that album.

Matt Stauffer : I played that out like no album for quite a while.

Taylor Otwell : Yeah, looking through my music ... okay, another album I played a lot was "Blue Neighbourhood", by Troye Sivan, who's not a rapper at all, he's a singer. But that's another album I just really wore out over the past couple of years

Matt Stauffer : I've literally never heard of it.

Taylor Otwell : Okay, you should check that out.

Matt Stauffer : I definitely will. That's awesome. I'll put all of this in the show notes. Okay, let's see, so I'm sure rap is one of these, but what outside program inspires you? Whether it's inspiring you to do good things with programming, because you hear something that gives you a thing, or just inspires you in terms of your life and your family and your entrepreneurial-ness or whatever else. What inspires you?

Taylor Otwell : Any time I travel, I feel like I get inspired. Any time I see some cool part of the world, or some really beautiful piece of scenery while I'm traveling or something, somehow that just inspires me to create cool stuff in general. For me, that usually translates into trying to think of cool Laravel ideas, so travel is a big inspiration for me. Let's see, what else ... you know music is a big inspiration. I don't know. Those are the two things that jump out at me.

Matt Stauffer : That's good. I didn't prepare you for this one, so sorry, but my friend DeRay and his podcast always asks every guest for one piece of advice that they've received that's really influenced them across their life ... is there any one piece of advice that really stands out, that has big impact on you, that you've gotten from somebody else?

Taylor Otwell : One thing that comes to mind that wasn't really a piece of advice, but just more like learning, is probably from my grandfather, who just did jobs really well. Anything he worked on, he just made sure it was done really right, in a way he could be proud of. I don't know, I guess it goes back to an old-fashioned work ethic that he must have been raised with, but I think that was really inspiring, and I actually blogged about this once, but when I worked with him, actually when I was in college, we took care of all the lawns at our local church. It was just a lot, because they had soccer fields, and just big lawns and stuff, and even with that, he put a lot of attention to detail into that. It inspired a lot of my own attention to detail and going forward. It wasn't a spoken piece of advice, it was more of just a thing you had to observe, but was pretty impactful.

Matt Stauffer : I remember that post. I'll link it. Well, I could ask you questions for another hour, but I'm gonna try and keep this one to the hour range, so I think that is pretty good for my questions for today. Is there anything else, especially along this line of questions, but just in general, that you feel like you want to talk about today?

Taylor Otwell : I can't think of anything.

Matt Stauffer : Okay. Taylor, this was ridiculously fun. Part of the reason that I'm having you is that the first episode of the Laravel Podcast, Season Three, is because everybody wants to know about you and you have a lot to say, but also I just want to say, officially, from me, and from Dan, and from the rest of the crew at Tighten, and the rest of the Laravel crew, thank you for what you've done for our community, because when I talk about Tighten, I say, "You know what? We're creating a company that we want to take care of people. We want to create good jobs for people and stuff like that." You're doing the same thing with Laravel. Yeah, you make money off of it, and you have the ability for yourself to create certain kinds of codes and stuff like that. But your attention to providing good things for people is evident throughout this interview, and just throughout everything about what you've done for Laravel. From all of us, thank you very much.

Taylor Otwell : All right. You're welcome.

Matt Stauffer : Awesome, man. Thank you so much for speaking with me today, and that's it for today.

Taylor Otwell : All right, see you. See you.

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Tue, 12 Sep 2017 08:43:00 +0000matt@mattstauffer.co (Matt Stauffer)Matt Stauffer00:47:57An interview with Taylor Otwell, creator of Laravel, about what he did before Laravel and what got him started.
An interview with Taylor Otwell, creator of Laravel, about what he did before Laravel and what got him started.
nofull23Season 3 Teaserea2f5936-9153-438d-8839-8de16fb3e7d0http://www.laravelpodcast.com/0485ae42
Introducing season 3: an interview season
Introducing season 3: an interview season, where Matt will be conducting long-form interviews of known and unknown members of the Laravel community to learn about who they are and what motivates them.

Matt Stauffer : Welcome to The Laravel Podcast episode 54, also known as the preview episode for season three where I tell you about what we're going to be doing for this new season. Stay tuned.

All right. Welcome back to The Laravel Podcast. It's been a little while and even since the last time we had been posting pretty infrequently. If you haven't been listening to the podcast for a long time, it's actually really easy to think about this podcast as having happened in two seasons up until now. The first season was Shawn McCool starting the podcast and having some regular guests where they did some pretty long form chats about some high depth, high intensity conversations about DDD and other stuff. A couple of years ago, I took over leading the podcast and it was myself, Matt Stauffer and then there was Taylor Otwell and Jeffrey Way speaking regularly on topics that are interesting to us, the news and happenings in the Laravel world and other stuff like that.

We've reached a point where each of us were pursuing separate podcasting and speaking opportunities. Also, we just got to the point where we ran out of things to talk about some of the times. We love talking and we got really great feedback but it just got to the point where sometimes we just said, "You know what? There's not really much to say right now." Rather than let that be a bother, we realized that that's a really good moment to step back and reconsider what you're doing. A lot of times when other podcasts have done that, hit that moment, it's a moment where you realize it's time for a little bit of a shift. This concept of seasons has come up recently where a podcast can have a season and then it could just stop and breathe for a moment. We decided that that was a indicator to us that it should be time to call that the end of season two and that gives us the ability to stop and think. What does the community really need for season three?

After a little while, we figured it out, and we are likening it to maybe a famous hiphop group or something like that where they split up and pursue their solo projects for a while. They might get back together later so there's no saying that season four is not going to be the gang all back together or a different gang or something like that. But, for right now, season three, Jeffrey is doing the Laracasts snippet. Taylor might have something of his own. We'll see.

And, what I'm going to be doing on this podcast is I'm going to be doing interviews. This is an interview show for season three and the interviews I'm going to be doing are two primary sorts. One of them is I'm going to be doing interviews of a sort that I hope you haven't heard before of the people who you hear from frequently in the community from Taylor, and from Jeffrey, and from Adam, from Eric Barnes, and Chris Fidao, and other people who've been around and who you hear from frequently, who you hear speaking at conferences and stuff like that to get maybe a different sort of interview, a little bit of a background of them of where they came from and what motivates them and the other stuff you might not hear in a traditional interview but I also want to have the opportunity to expose some folks to you that you may have not have heard from before, people in the community who are doing incredible work and might not get recognized outside of the world that they're in, their country or their meetup, or their package, or whatever else.

Season three of Laravel Podcast is an interview show to help you get to know all the people in the Laravel community who you do or do not know by name but you might not know their origins and what motivates them and where they're from. The first podcast episode, episode one which will be ... The total episode will be episode 55 across the whole podcast. I'll try and release it in about a week from this preview episode and I'm going to give you a couple quick little snippets of that interview right now to tantalize and tease, to get you excited about what's coming.

What I would love is when I tweet this one out, please send me anybody who you really like to hear an interview of. I'm Stauffer Matt on Twitter. Just let me know if there's somebody ... You know what? Even better, @laravelpodcast. Why don't you send it over to the podcast? And, if there's anybody you'd really love to know, who they come from, what they come from, what they're about, what motivates them, anything else and they're in the Laravel community, I'd love to hear it. That's it. That's the bases. Here's a couple quick snippets from the episode one and stay tuned for some really great interviews coming out during the season.

Taylor Otwell : I also got really into TI-83 calculator program. I would write little strategy games. Back then in at least middle school and high school, the popular thing was that Drugwars game.

Matt Stauffer : I was just going to say Drugwars. That was it.

Taylor Otwell : I would write games like that either with drugs or with other lemonade stand type games. I learned how to do that basically sitting in 9th grade English. I just taught myself how to program the calculator. Those were really the first real programs I wrote I feel like.

I had messaged one of them and said, "Hey, I really like to help out on Fuel. This is the feature I want to add," or whatever. They weren't super interested in the feature which is fine. I'm just not like a knock on them. They just weren't interested in it. I was like, "Oh. Well, okay. I guess I'll keep working in Laravel." But, if they would have bit on that and been interested in me helping with Fuel a little bit and some of these things, then of course I think things could have been really different because I would have jumped into Fuel and started adding stuff there. I probably would have just started using it and become invested in. That's one moment. Probably the biggest moment I could think of where things could have took a really different direction. Because that feature wasn't really a fit for them, then I just kept working on Laravel.

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Wed, 06 Sep 2017 19:57:00 +0000matt@mattstauffer.co (Matt Stauffer)Matt Stauffer00:06:20Introducing season 3: an interview season
Introducing season 3: an interview season
laravelnofull13Episode 53: Bigger & Bettera18d78d2-e3b2-47f5-bc41-a7968b1ff400http://www.laravelpodcast.com/5fc5650b
In this episode, the crew talks about enterprise applications, scalability, and productivity.
In this episode, the crew talks about enterprise applications, scalability, and productivity.

Intro: Alright welcome back to another episode of the Laravel Podcast, I am one of your hosts, Matt Stauffer, I have got two guys joining me...Can you introduce yourselves?

JEFFREY WAY: I am Jeffery Way!

TAYLOR OTWELL: And I am Taylor Otwell.

MATT STAUFFER: It's been a little while but we are back with a little bit more to share and if you haven't gotten a chance to check out the Laravel New...News Podcast...alllaugh...Check out the Laravel new Podcast where...

Interjections

MATT STAUFFER: Checkout the Laravel New..News Podcast...oh my gosh! Everytime now! News Podcast, where Jacob Bennett and Michael Dyrynda, basically being Australian and ' Illinoisian' tell you all the greatest and latest news that is going on with Laravel, so, because they are covering that so well, we are going off the beaten track a little bit talking about a few kinda broader topics, so, what we did was, we put out some requests on the Twitter account and said "Hey folks, what do you want us to talk about?"

And we picked a couple interesting ones and we just want to...just like the reader grab bag or... whatever you call it on your podcast Jeffery, so, the first one at the top of the queue is...something we hear about all the time, not just in this particular request, which is "Can Laravel be used for big apps?"

And sometimes this comes in the same conversation of well you know if you want to do enterprise you should use this framework or if you just want to do a cute little thing, then use Laravel.

You know, there are all this like statements and perceptions that people have and make about this, so before we go anywhere else, I would ask like, what is and do we know, what is the definition of an enterprise app, like if someone, and then again we are trying to give as much grace as possible to the person who actually thinks there is a distinction...what makes an enterprise app?

Is it about lines of code? Is it about patents? Is it about security? Is it about traffic? Like what makes something a big app? And or an enterprise app? Do you guys have a sense for that?

JEFFREY WAY: I really don't. So I basically have the same question. From afar, I will just say an enterprise app is something I imagine that is really really big...I don't know, it is an interesting distinction that people always make. I mean for as long as I can remember, even back in the Codeigniter days, you had this idea that Codeigniter is for these sorts of hobby projects but then if you are on the enterprise level, you are gonna reach for Zend or you are gonna reach for Symphony.

And I feel like even after all those years, I can't quite figure out, what specific features or functionality do they have, that make them suitable for enterprise or what would Codeigniter not have or what does Laravel not have...hmm... is it related to the fact that Zend has a big company behind it?

And whereas with Laravel, you know, like everyone is just gonna keep creating threads about ...what happens when Taylor dies? Is that the kind of idea? Like this is open source...it's kind of rickety...you are not sure what the state of it is, you are not sure if it's going to be abandoned?

And with Zend, maybe if you have a big company behind it..maybe you can depend upon it more? Maybe? I don't know, I have the same question as everyone else.

TAYLOR OTWELL Yeah, I think most people mean lots of classes I guess. You know, lots of code, lots of lines of code and I think the answers is, you know, obviously I am going to say yes it can be used for big apps, one because it has been used for big apps in the past, so we already know it's true basically.

But then also, I think that, you know, Laravel is good for any app that PHP is good for, so, Laravel gives you a good routing system and a way to route request as classes and sort of beyond that is really up to you, you know, once you are past the controller, you basically have total freedom to do whatever you want to do, so, it's up to you in terms of if your app is going to be scalable in terms of complexity. And also I think Laravel is kind of uniquely qualified and better at making big apps than other PHP offerings right now, for a few reasons.

One because when people start talking about big apps, a lot of time there is dependency complexity and Laravel Dependency Injection Container is really good and it's really thoroughly baked in throughout the entire framework. When you talk about complicated apps, a lot of time you are also talking about needs like background job processing and Laravel has basically the only baked in queue system out of any major framework in PHP...hmmm...and then of course there is event broadcasting and other features that I would say are more kind of on the big app side of things, so, not only is it...can it be used for big apps, I think it's uniquely better for big apps than other alternatives out there in PHP right now for those reasons.

And I think it's just a little misleading because it is easy to get started with, and has a very simple starting point. And since that has a single route file you can kind of jump into it and start hacking around on, but it also scales up, you know with your needs and with your team's needs in terms of complexity...so yeah, that's kind of my take on it.

Everyone kind of thinks that their app is a special snowflake you know, that has this, very unique requirements that have never been required in the history of web apps, but, the vast majority of applications don't have unique requirements and they don't really have unique needs and you know Laravel and many other frameworks really are going to be a good fit for them but I think Laravel is the best option in PHP right now for a big sophisticated application.

JEFFREY WAY: And it is funny because, for whatever reason everyone thinks their project is going to be the one that really put Laravel to the test in terms of how many page views it can render in a single second...all that stuff like...if you need to worry about that, you are at such high level and you will know if you need to worry about that or not, but 90, I would say 99% of projects will never even get close to that point.

So, it's almost like, to be frank, it's almost like a sense of vanity that you think the project you are working on right now is something that really needs to worry about that, because you probably are not even close.

TAYLOR OTWELL Yeah, and we are assuming, developers don't approach projects in a rational way, even though we think they might. Like people don't choose frameworks in a rational way, they don't choose anything really laughs related to tech in rational way, a lot of time, as surprising as that is.

There's a lot of things that go into it and some of it are sort of personality things, maybe they don't like a way that a certain framework is marketed or not marketed. You know some people are very turned off by active marketing around open source, so, maybe they don't like the style of Laravel sort of friendly, hey look at easy this is easy kind of marketing and they are turned off by that, and so they choose something that is more toned down, more sort of suite and tie like Zend because that fit's their personality better.

It's not really a technical decision, it's more of just personality or subjective decision. And that happens a lot with tech in general, you know, some people don't use anything that is popular in general, just the kind of classic hipster type thing. I think a lot goes into it and rarely is it purely technical. Sometimes it is... they don't like me! You know, they don't like me personally. And so they don't like Laravel or use Laravel.

JEFFREY WAY: I like you Taylor.

Everyone laughs

JEFFREY WAY: Right before we started recording, I guess RailsConf is going on and I was watching DHH give his presentation live...and he was kind of talking about this to some extent...the idea that it is important even for a tool like Rails or Laravel to have like their own culture and their own sense of values. And he was talking about how like a lot of people take this idea that you just learn all the different languages and then... you do...you are a programmer. So, if you need to work in this local language, you do it and you just apply everything over.

And he was talking about how like while that is true, what is wrong with being part of the community that has a very specific culture, very specific views...he talked about like the people that are still using Rails are doing it, maybe not just because it's better, but because they agree with the values that Rails represents. That is like the huge reason why people still use it to this day. And I think, that is very much true for Laravel as well. It is kind of interesting way to think about things. It's all personality, it's about what your values are. What you connect with and what you don't connect with.

TAYLOR OTWELL Yeah...when I first started Laravel, that was a big part of how I wanted, how I thought Laravel could be successful, because I knew that in my own life, like there is sort of this ongoing desire to sort of connect with a group of people. Some sort of community or whatever around shared values. And you know that can be found like around many different things like music, or sport or religion, or whatever.

And I knew with programming like I wanted to connect with this group of people that has similar values about writing really clean code and having a good time doing it and making it enjoyable and sort of interesting, new and fresh. And that's kind of how I presented Laravel and I think it resonated with some people that were also looking for a group with those kinds of values.

And that is still the kind of the values that we obviously try to share today, but yeah, it wasn't necessarily a purely technical thing, it was building this group of people that sort of resonates around similar ideas and working on it together.

MATT STAUFFER: It's interesting 'cos I think that even in my question, I conflicted big and enterprise and I think that you guys kind of really drew out the difference between the two in some of your answers, I mean if we think about it, like Jeffery's first answer was, while enterprise might be really interested in having a company back it versus a person..like Taylor said, we get the question of what if Taylor gets hit by a bus all the time.

And it makes sense right, like we have clients all the time coming to us like, say, you know well, you know the CEO or the board or the CFO of our multi-million dollar or multi-billion company are very worried that we are gonna invest a whole bunch of money and time in something and X ..and it's not always...and that Taylor might get run over by a bus, but a lot of developers are getting non-developer input on decisions they make here and there are certain times where some IT persons have set up some rules that says like

"You can only use projects like this and not [projects like that and I do wonder whether there are some constraints there like one of them being, that it must of be owned by a company, I know that when we worked with CraftCMS a lot of people said well, why would you, there's actually a business value of using CraftCMS over something Wordpress because Craft is making money and therefore it's a sustainable business model and therefore the business people are actually less worried about this thing disappearing. Right? So like maybe a more direct chain of profit to the people who are running the thing might actually make it clearer.

I don't know if that exists maybe ZendCon would be something like that but I know it's Laracon too...I don't really know!

But it's interesting that the requirements of ...like the true enterprise requirements...like because I work for a company, my company has these requirements...but I think people, including me when I ask these questions conflict that with big. And so I think there is a good place to take this next is, lets step away from enterprise a little bit...enterprise culture is a thing...you know whatever...let's talk about big, so the thing mentioned Taylor, and Jeffery both of you said a lot of people come along and say oh well mine is going to be the one that finally pushes those bounds right, I am gonna run into traffic issues and stuff like that, so, first of all, like I know that we can't say a lot of the names of big sites that are running on it but I feel like is there anything we can do to kind of like just ...

I mean, I know several of them 'cos I am under NDA with several of them, you know, who have talked to us about doing some work with us but there's like multi- I mean milions of millions of hundreds of millions of page views sites running on Laravel...there is like Alexa top 500 sites running on Laravel, there's ...hummmm...what's the big group of all the businesses in the US? I can't remember the name of it...Fortune 500 companies running on Laravel...like multiple Fortune 500 companies whose websites are running on Laravel. Are there anything that you guys can share, like to say, hey look, this is the proof, like we've got big stuff running through here.

TAYLOR OTWELL Trying to think some of them..I mean like the Vice Video, Log Swan, you know, various video games sites like FallOut 4 had their landing page on Laravel...other stuff like that, but you know, it's sort of never seems to be enough and it sorts of becomes this treadmill of, you know, I have to give one more proof that it sort of can work...and I just wonder like what's really underlining the question like, do they want to know that if I build my big app on Laravel will it be infinitely maintainable and clean...and no, Laravel won't automatically make your app amazing to maintain for 10 years, you know, I don't know if it's like trying to sort of scale responsibility for you also having to do a lot effort to like make your app enjoyable to maintain or what...but...

MATT STAUFFER: Bad programmer, can write a bad app with any framework right? Like, nothing is going to rescue you from that..not saying that the person asking is necessarily bad..but I think that's a great point you made earlier Taylor, I wish we can further into it, is that with Laravel like yea ok, Laravel has it's own conveniences but at some point every single app is basically just you writing PHP...

TAYLOR OTWELL: Yeah

MATT STAUFFER: And especially at this level when you are talking about hundreds of thousands of lines of code, like the vast majority of the dependencies there is going to be just PHP code right?

TAYLOR OTWELL: Yeah. Once you get...let's just take like a Laravel app...'laravel new'...whatever...once you are at the controller, method, in your controller class, everything else is up to you, so whether you use the validator or whether you even use Eloquent at all, or whether you use anything in Laravel, is entirely up you, so it was your choice to do whatever you did past that point.

So, it's not Laravel making you do any one particular thing. So, that's sort of the point where you are gonna have to, you know turn your thinking cap on and really plan on how to do a big project, because as far as the framework is concerned, the framework is gonna be a much smaller concern than your actual code, you know the framework is gonna be routing session, some caching, some database calls, but you are the one that is gonna have to like, figure out the domain problems of your app, which is gonna be way more complicated I think, than any framework problems you are gonna have.

Like, how is this app gonna work? How is it gonna provide value for our customers, or whatever, those are all like much bigger questions I think...than worrying about can Laravel be used for "Big" apps.

MATT STAUFFER: One of the questions we got on Twitter was, how to build big sites with Laravel, scaling, deployment, database structure, load balancing, so, lets say someone is on board right...yes, Laravel can be used for big apps period..it's good..so, what are some considerations that you would have, so if you were taking, you know, a default app out of the box and you "laravel new" it and you build some basic stuff and someone says alright, this app that you just built needs to be able to handle you know, a million hits a week next month..what are the first things you would look to, to start, kind of hardening it against that kind of traffic?

TAYLOR OTWELL: Hmm, really simple things you could do is to make sure you are using a good cache or session driver, so probably you wanna use something like Memcache or Redis or something that you can centralize on one server or Elasticache if you are on AWS whatever, you know, you are also probably gonna use a load balancer...PHP is really easy to deploy this way you know, to put a LoadBalancer up and to make a few PHP servers and to alternate traffic between them.

PHP makes it really simple to do that kind of scaling and then with Laravel, make sure you use config cache, make sure you are using the route cache, make sure you are doing composer dump autoload optimized, you know, really simple things you can do to sort of boost your application a little bit.

MATT STAUFFER: Jeffery, I know Laracast is pretty huge, you kinda in there day in, day out, so I know you are super focused on making sure that it's performing, especially related to maybe, let's say, databases and deployment, can you give me any kind of tips that you have there for people who are building new kind of high traffic apps that you have learned from developing Laracast?

JEFFREY WAY: Yeah, Laracast is surprisingly high traffic, if you look at the numbers. And I can tell you, not doing that much...just to be perfectly frank, beyond what Taylor said, a lot of that stuff is kind of the fundamentals...of using config cache...a lot of people will just deploy and stick with the file based cache driver...laughs..you will obviously have some issues with that...but, I am not doing anything that fancy.

A lot of it becomes basic stuffs like, people completely ignoring the size of their images...like that is always the very first one I bring up and it's such a 101 tip, but if you go from site to site, you can see it being abused immensely. There is so many ways to work it into your build process...or if not, just dragging a bunch of images into..like a Mac app...I am trying to think of the one I use...

TAYLOR OTWELL: Is it ImageOptim?

JEFFREY WAY: ImageOptim, yeah just, like when you deploy you can drag a bunch of images up there and it will automatically optimize them as best as it can. And you would be shocked how much benefit you can get from that...versus people who just take a 100kb image and they throw it into their project...you know it's funny that people will debate single quotes versus double quotes all day and then throw a 200kb image into their banner, you know, it makes no sense, people, are silly that way.

TAYLOR OTWELL: I think another great thing to do is separate out your database from your web server. If you are building anything, you know, that you care about...like in a real way, it can be good to do that..and sort of, if you don't do it from the start, it can be kind of, you know, scary to make the transition, because now you've got to move your live database to another server...but, there are tools out there to make it pretty easy, there are even free packages out there to make it pretty easy to back up your database, so, that has always been really nice for me to have that on a separate server.

So definitely if you are gonna have to start do that because it just makes it easier to do that scaling where if you wanna add a second server, you don't have this sort of funky situation where you have one webserver talking to another webserver because it has your database and all that other stuff where now if you want upgrade PHP you've got to upgrade PHP on the same server that your live database is running on...just scary situations like that...that, that would help you avoid.

MATT STAUFFER: Are you guys using a lot of caching on your common Eloquent Queries?

JEFFREY WAY: Yeah, I do quite a bit.

TAYLOR OTWELL: I really don't on Forge.

MATT STAUFFER: I wondered about Forge, because with Forge, each query is gonna be unique per user right? Versus with Jeffery where there might be like a page that lists out all of the episode and you might have 10, 000 people hit that same page. With Forge, it's more 10,000 people each seeing a totally different list right?

TAYLOR OTWELL Yeah, it is very dynamic. The one thing I do cache is the list of invoices from stripe because there is a stripe API call we have to make, so we do cache that.

JEFFREY WAY: Yeah me too.

TAYLOR OTWELL: But other than that I don't think I really do any caching. So, Jeffrey probably has more insight on that...?

JEFFREY WAY: Well I have a lot of the stuff on the Forum, because the forum just gets hammered...you will be surprised about how popular that forum is...

MATT STAUFFER: I won't be surprised because it shows up on the top results of everything.

JEFFREY WAY: I know and I do love finding my forum when am googling for my own ignorance. And I go to my own website to figure out how to do something which is a great feeling! But I do have some queries related to the forum that are pretty intense, a lot of like multiple joins, pulling in stuff, so I do cache that..even summary, I cache that every 10 minutes at a time.

Just to reduce the weight a little bit. I get a lot of use out of that stuff and then, yeah, of course, the type of stuff that doesn't just change like Categories or Channels or like Taylor was bringing up, there is no reason not to cache those things. And yes especially the invoices it's a great example, if you are making a network query every single time a page is hit, there is really no need to do that if it's going to be the exact same results...every single time give or take a change or two...so those are obvious cases where you want to cache it as long as you can.

TAYLOR OTWELL: Ok so I guess like whenever a new category is out and stuff, you just ...

JEFFREY WAY: When a new category is out yeah, as part of that I will just manually bust the cache...or no, I will automatically bust the cache...in other areas, it happens so rarely that I just boot up 'php artisan tinker' and do it myself....laughs...which is crappy, but no, anything more common like that, I will just automate it as part of the...whenever I update the database.

MATT STAUFFER: We are working on an app right now that has Varnish sitting in front of it. And so literately the code that is behind our Skype window right now is me writing a job that just wipes the Varnish cache either for the whole thing or for specific routes in response to us notifying that the change happens and that's an interesting thing because the cache is outside of Laravel app, but it's cached based on its routes...and so I have the ability to say...well, these particular changes are gonna modify these routes and I built an intelligent Job that kinda get sent out anytime we need those things.

So even when it is not within the app, even when it is not your Laravel cache, there is still a lot of ability to kind of put some heavy caches on. And in speaking of that kind of stuff cache busting, use the Version in mix all the time. I mean that is just, because then you can throw Varnish or whatever else and just do infinite cache on your assets.

And if you all don't know what that is, it's essentially every single asset that gets built by Mix now has like a random string appended at the end of the file name. And every time it's changed, it gets a new random string on it. And so you can set a forever expires on your Javascript files, your CSS files or whatever else, because anytime it needs to change, it would actually be a different file name as your browser will get to request it and then Varnish will get re-request it or whatever is your cache is.

JEFFREY WAY: But on that note, actually, I have been thinking about that, is there...can you guys tell me any real reason why when we are using Versioning, the file name itself needs to change? Because you are using that Mix helper function already to dynamically figure out what the version file is, so is there any reason why we can't just use a unique query string there, or not a unique query string but taking where we would change the file name to include the version, we just include it as part of the query string and then the file name always stays the same?

MATT STAUFFER: I know that HTML5 boiler plate used to do just query strings and I hadn't even thought about that, but that might be possible, where the files always stay the same but your...what's that JSON file that has the ....

JEFFREY WAY: JSON manifest...

MATT STAUFFER: Maybe that just adds the id into the new id to pass? And it's just like authoring comment or something like that?

JEFFREY WAY: Yeah, when you version the file, it creates, basically it gets like a Hash of the file that you just bundled up and then that gets included in the new file name...but every time you bundle if that changes, you will never know what that file name is called in your HTML so basically you can use this Mix helper function that Laravel provides that will dynamically read that JSON file and it will figure out, oh you want this file, well, here is the current hashed version and we return that...but yeah I have just been thinking lately like, is it kind of dumb that we keep creating a new file, when instead, the Mix manifest file can just have the relevant query string updated.

MATT STAUFFER: So, I googled really quick and there is a thing from Steve Souders....who is the guy who originated the 13 rules of make your website faster or whatever they were...the whole like, you know less HTTP requests, and it's called in your files names don't use query strings...I havent read it yet...oh High Performant websites...I havent read it yet and it is 9 years old.

My God! Now that I am seeing seen him talking about Squid, I have worked with Squid before which is like a pretty old cache, but a lot of stuff that works for Squid also works for Cloudflare so I am guessing Cloudflare is either using Squid or adopted Squids terminologies and I do think...and I also did a whole bunch of work with one of our clients who is writing custom Varnish rules right now. And I do remember that stripping query strings is a thing that happens sometimes especially when it doesn't matter, for example in the case of asset, I think it maybe a thing that he do by default, so he is digging through here and Squid and proxies and stuff like that, I think basically what he is saying is your proxy administrator could go and teach the proxy to care about query strings but all then ignore them by default...

JEFFREY WAY: Ok

MATT STAUFFER: So by choosing to use it with query strings you are opening up a lot of job opportunities where it doesn't work the way you are expecting.

TAYLOR OTWELL: I have been using Cloudflare quite a bit recently. The whole Laravel website is behind Cloudflare, heavy Cloudflare caching, very few requests actually hit the real server. Mainly because it's all static, you know documentation but am a big fan of that, especially when you are scaling out webservers, if you are using, you know, some kind of Cloudflare SSL.

I think Amazon has a similar SSL service now, it makes so much easier to add a web server because you don't really have to think about your certificates as much, you know, putting your certificate on every server, especially because since you can just use like a self-signed certificate if you are using the Cloudflare edge certificate...so that's something to look into and it's free to get started with and it has some nice feature for scaling.

MATT STAUFFER: I helped some folks at this thing called the Resistance Manual, which is a Wiki about basically...huh......sorry to be mildly political for a second...all the negative impact of the Trump presidency and how to kind of resist against those things. And so they wanted me to help them gather their information together and I said well I can help out, I am a tech guy and they were like, do you know, you know, media wiki, which is the open source platform behind things like Wikipedia, and I said no, but you know, I can learn it.

Turns out that it's like really old school janky procedure PHP and so I said yeah I can handle this but it is also just extremely dumb in terms of how it interacts with the database and so when you are getting you know millions of hits like they were on day one, we had a like a 8 core, you know, hundreds of hundreds of dollars a month Digital Ocean box and it was still just tanking.

Like couple of times a day that the caches were getting overflowed and all that kind of stuff, so, I threw clouldflare on it, hoping it would be magical and the problem with that is it's not Cloudflare's fault it's because Cloudflare or Squid or Varnish needs to have some kind of reasonable rules knowing when things have changed and for anyone who has never dealt with them before there is a sort of complicated but hopefully not too complicated dance between your proxy and reading things like expires headers and E-Tags and all that kind of stuff from your website.

And so if you throw something like Cloudflare or something like that on it and it is not working the way you expect, the first thing to look at is both the expires headers and the cache link headers that are coming off of your server pre-cloudflare and also what that same response looks like when it's coming back after going through cloudflare, and cloudflare or whoever else will add a couple of other ones like did it hit the cache or miss the cache and what's the expires headers and what's the Squids expires headers, so there are lots of headers that give you the ability when it just seems like it is not just working the way you want and there is only like 3 configuration options in cloudflare, then what do you do?

Go look at your headers and I bet that you know, 15 minutes of googling about how cloudflare headers work and Squid headers work and then inspecting all your headers before and after they hit cloudflare and you will be able to source out the problem.\
Alright so, we talked databases, we talked loadbalancing a little bit, deployment, so, if anybody is not familiar with zero downtime deployment, just a quick introduction for how it works...if you use deployments on something like Forge the default response when you push something new to your github branch is that it hits 'git pull', 'composer install' 'php artisan migrate' or whatever, so your site could erratically be down for seconds while the whole process runs and so, if you are worried about that you can run, 'php artisan down' beforehand and 'php artisan up' afterwards, so when it's down, instead of throwing an error, you just see like hey this site is temporary down kind of thing.

But if you are in a circumstances where that is a problem, you might want to consider something like Capistrano style or Envoyer style zero downtime deploy, look somewhere else for a much longer explanation but essentially, every time a new release comes out, it's cloned into a new directory, the whole installation is processed and run there and only once that is done, then the public directory that is getting served is symlinked into that new directory instead of the old one.

So you end up with you know with the last 10 releases each in its own directory and you can go back and roll back into a previous directory and Taylor's service Envoyer is basically a really nice User Interface in front of that...

For me that has always been the easiest way to handle deploys in a high kind of pressure high traffic high loads situations is just to use Envoyer or Capistrano.

Are there any other experiences you've all had or tips or anything about how to handle deploys in high traffic settings when you are really worried about you know those 15 seconds or whatever...are there any other considerations we should be thinking about? or anything?

TAYLOR OTWELL: That's the extent of my experience..I haven't had anything that is more demanding than using Envoyer. Am sure there is you know...if I were deploying to thousands of servers, but for me when I am just deploying to 4 or 5 servers Envoyer has been huh...pretty good bet.

MATT STAUFFER: And hopefully if you are deploying to a thousand sites, then you've got a server person who is doing that. You know like we are talking dev'ops for developers here right, like when you are running a minor server not when you are running a multi-billion dollar product and the clients I have been talking to were working with all these kind of Varnish stuff..I didnt setup Varnish you know, my client setup Varnish and took care of all these stuff and he just kinda asked me for an input in these kind of stuff and so I definitely would say like there is definitely a limit at which...you know...people often lament like how many responsibilities they are putting on developers these days.

I don't think we all have to be IT people capable of running servers for you know, a one thousand server setup for some massive startup or something like that. But I think like this whole, you know, how do I handle a thing big enough that 15 seconds of down time where a migration and composer run...I think that is often within our purview and I think something like Capistrano or Envoyer is for me at least it's being a good fix...the only situation I have not had to run into which I have heard people asked about online and I wanna see if you all have any experience there is, what if you do a roll out and it has a migration in it and then you need to roll back?

Is there an easy way to do the 'migrate:rollback' in an Envoyer rollback command or should you just go Envoyer rollback as you SSH in and then do 'php artisan migrate:rollback'

TAYLOR OTWELL: Sort of my view on that recently like over the past year has been that you will just never roll back, ever. And you will always go forward. So, because I don't know how you rollback without losing customer data. So, it's, a lot of time not really visible to rollback. Lets just pretend you could, then yes, there is no real easy way to do it on Envoyer, you will just kind have to SSH in and do php artisan rollback like you said.

But I think a lot of times, at least for like my own project like Forge and Envoyer, I can never really guarantee that I wasn't loosing data so I think if at all possible, what I would try to do is to write an entirely new migration that fixes whatever problem there is. And deploy that and it will just migrate forward, you know. And I will never really try to go backwards.

MATT STAUFFER: You find yourself in that accidental situation where you deploy something that should never have been, then you then go 'php artisan down' real quick, run the fix, push it up and let it go through the deploy process and then 'php artisan up' after that one deployed.

TAYLOR OTWELL: Yeah. That's what I would do. If it's, I mean, sometimes if it's low traffic and you feel pretty certain no one's messed with the new database schema, then probably you can just roll back, but, I was just worried in Forge's case that people are in there all day, I would lose data. So that's why I would every time possible to try and go forward.

JEFFREY WAY: I feel evil doing that! Like I very much get the argument...but, when I create a migration and I just ignore the down method, I feel like, I am just doing something wrong. I am still doing it right now.

TAYLOR OTWELL: It's really mainly visible in Laravel 5.5 'cos you've got the new db:fresh method or db:fresh command, which just totally drops all the tables without running any down methods.

MATT STAUFFER: I end up doing that manually all the time anyway because at least in development, the most often when I want to do refresh, it's often in context where I still feel comfortable modifying old migrations..like basically, the moment I have run a migration in prod, I would never modify an old migration. The moment there is somebody else working on the project with me, I will never modify an old one unless I have to and it's just so important that I have to say hey, you know, lets go refresh.

But often when I am just starting something out and I have got my first 6 migrations out, I will go back and hack those things over and over again...I don't need to add a migration that has a single alter in it, when I can just go back and edit the thing. And in that context often, I change the migration and then I try to roll back, and sometimes I have changed it in such a way where the rollback doesn't work anymore. I rename the table or something like that...

JEFFREY WAY: Right....

MATT STAUFFER: So fresh is definitely going to be a breath of fresh air.

JEFFREY WAY: I do wish there was maybe a way to consolidate things, like when you have a project that has been going on for a few years, you can end up in a situation where your migrations folder is huge...you just have so many. And it's like every time you need to boot it up, you are running through all of those and like you said sometimes, just the things you've done doesn't just quite work anymore and you can't rollback.

It would be nice sometimes if you could just have like...like a reboot, like just consolidate all of these down to something very very simple.

MATT STAUFFER: We did that with Karani I don't know if there is...there is a tool that we used that helps you generate Laravel migrations from Schema and we did it soon after we had migrated from Codeigniter to Laravel for our database access layer. Karani is a Codeigniter app where I eventually started bringing in Laravel components and then now, the actual core of the app is in Laravel and there is just like a third of the route that are still on Codeigniter that havent been moved over and once we got to the point where half of our migrations were Codeigniter and half of them were in Laravel it's just such a mess so we found this tool...whatever it was.

We exported the whole thing down to a single migration, archived all the old ones, I mean, we have them on git if we ever need them and now, there is just one..you know, one date from where you just get this massive thing, and then all of our migrations happen kind of, from that date. And for me, I actually feel more free to do that when it's in production because the moment it's in production, I have less concern about being able to speed it up through this specific process because like if something is from two months ago, I am sure it had already has been run in production and so I feel less worry about making sure the history of it still sticks around...

JEFFREY WAY: Alright...right...

MATT STAUFFER: Alright...so the next question we have coming up is, "I will like to hear about how you all stay productive." And we've talked on and off at various times about what we use..I know we've got us some Todoist love and I know we've got some WunderList

love...hummm...

I've have some thoughts about Calendar versus Todo lists and I also saw something about Microsoft buying and potentially ruining Wunderlist..so what do y'all use and what happened with Wunderlist.

TAYLOR OTWELL: Well, Todo lists are dead now that Wunderlist is dead.

MATT STAUFFER: Yeah...So what happened?

TAYLOR OTWELL: Wunderlist was my preferred todo list, I just thought it looked pretty good...and Microsoft bought them I think, that was actually little while back that they bought them but now they have finally announced what they are actually doing with it...they are basically shutting down Wunderlist and turning it into Microsoft Todo...which doesn't look a lot like the old Wunderlist and doesn't have some of the features of the old Wunderlist...but it looked ok..you know, it seems fun, so what I have done is migrated to Todoist rather reluctantly but it's working out ok.

JEFFREY WAY: Please correct me...is this funny like, Wunderlist is gonna be around for a very long time but just the idea that they are shutting down it's almost like you feel compelled...we've talked about this with other things too...where it's like you suddenly feel like oh I need to migrate...we talked about it with Sublime, like if we find out tomorrow, Sublime is dead in the water.

But you can still use it as long as you want. Even though, it would still work great, you would have this feeling like well, I gotta get over to Atom or I gotta start moving on...'cos this place is dead, even though Wunderlist is gonna work for a long time.

TAYLOR OTWELL: Yes...laughs...as soon as it was announced, I basically deleted Wunderlist off my computer...

All laugh....

TAYLOR OTWELL: Which makes no sense, but it's so true...

MATT STAUFFER: I needed a new router and everyone told me, you use the Apple Routers 'cos they are the best...but I have heard they are 'end-of-life'd'....and I was like no way...no way I am gonna throw all my money there and someone say well, why does it matter...you know...you are gonna buy a router and you are gonna use it till it dies?

And I said I don't care...I am gonna buy something else 'cos it just...I don't know...it's just like you are putting your energy and your effort after something that can't...you know can only be around for so long and you just want..you want be working with something that's gonna last I guess...

JEFFREY WAY: Yeah...I am still on Wunderlist right now. I am hearing...humm..if you guys are familiar with "Things" that was like the big Todo app years ago...and then they have been working on Things 3 or third version for a year...it's been so long, that people joke about it..you know, it's almost like that...new version of..humm..what was it...there was hummm...some Duke Nukem game that....

TAYLOR OTWELL: Is it Duke Nukem Forever..?

JEFFREY WAY: Yes! For like 10 or fifteen years and it finally came out! It's looking like next month, "Things 3" will be out and I am hearing it..like the prettiest ToDo app ever made I am hearing really good things. So, I was hoping to get in on the beta but, they skipped over me. So, I will experience it in May but I am excited about it. So, that's the next one..but you know what, I am never happy with Todo apps..I don't know why. It's kinda of weird addiction...if you say an item address basic need...even like a Microsoft Todo.

Ok, your most basic need would be to like say...Go to the market on Thursday. You can't do that in Microsoft Todo. You have to manually like set the due date to Thursday. Rather than just using human speech.

TAYLOR OTWELL: Have you tried Todoist?

JEFFREY WAY: Todoist works that way. Huh I think Wunderlist works that way but now, Microsoft Todo doesn't.

MATT STAUFFER: Oh ok..got it. You lost that ability right?

JEFFREY WAY: Yeah, it's so weird like every task app would have something that's really great and then other basic things that are completely missing...and it's been that way for years.

MATT STAUFFER: I always feel bad, I mean I bought things...thankfully I managed to skip...what was that thing...OminiFocus, I skipped OminiFocus which is good 'cos that is hundreds of dollars saved for me. And I tried...I tried all these different things and I finally figured out that there is a reason why I keep jumping from one to the other, is because..for me...this is not true for everybody...and I think it might have to do with personality a little bit...and the industry a little bit, and what your roles are whatever, Todo lists are fundamentally flawed because they are not the way I approach the day...and they are not the place my brain is...so, I can force my brain into a new paradigm for even a week at a time but I have never been able to stick with it and it's not the app, I thought it was the app, I thought just once I get the right app, I will become a todolist person and I realized, I am not a Todolist person so I can try every app and it can be perfect and I will still just stop using it 'cos it's not what I think about.

And when I discovered that I can't use and then later found some articles talking about how I am not the only person who come up with this...that validated me...'cos I put it on my calendar and so, if I need to do something, I put it on my calendar and then it gets done. And if I don't put it on my calendar, it doesn't get done. End of story.

It's so effective for me that my wife knows at this point that if she asks me to do something and I don't immediately pick up my phone and put it on my calendar, she knows it's not gonna get done. Because that's..that's how things happen and so, it's amazing to me, that..laughs...she literarily, when she first started discovering this, she sent..and she's not not super technical..like she's smart, she just doesn't like computers all that much...but she knows how to use google..and so, she, when she first discovered this, she sent me a calendar invite that is "Matt Clean Toilet"...and it's for 8 hours every Sunday and so, I will be on a screenshare..'cos she's like that's how I am ever going to clean the toillet right?...so I will be on this screenshare with a client and I will pull up my calendar and to say hey when is it a good time for us to have this meeting? And I will be like..oh "Matt Clean Toilet" takes the 8 hours....laughs...

But for me, my todo list is my calendar.

And everyone kinda in the company knows what my calendar is completely for and Dan actually has asked me to start marking those things as not busy, so, Calendly, our appointment app will still allow people to book...like clients to book times with me during that time..but like essentially, if I need to get something done, like, I..I need to review a whole bunch of pull requests, like Daniel who works with me literarily just put meeting invite on my calendar for tomorrow 10:30 and it says "Code Review @ Daniel".

And literarily after this podcast, there is an hour that says "Code Review with James" because they know that that's how they get it....and there is...500 hundred emails in my inbox and all these other things I have to do, but if it goes to the calendar, it gets done.

So, have you guys ever tried that? Does it sound like something that will click with you or no?

JEFFREY WAY: I think it makes good sense for you because it sounds like your days are scheduled like your day is full..humm...my day isn't quite as much like do this with so and so, I don't have as many meetings. So, most of my day is like: these are the things I wanna get done. And it doesn't matter whether I do it at 9:AM or 9:PM, so, Todo list works good for me but yeah..I can see how like if my day was very segmented and scheduled that would make far more sense than reaching for some todo app.

TAYLOR OTWELL: Yeah..my days are usually pretty free-form outside of the kinda standard schedule where I always do emails and pull requests first thing in the morning but then after that lately it's been...you know..was work on Horizon..now it's work on the thing that comes after Horizon, and that's pretty much the rest of the day, you know, besides whatever Laracon stuff that I have to do recently, which is more of a seasonal thing you know.

But I got lunch, all booked, that's done...but whatever we need, you know, furniture, catering or whatever. But yeah, then I pretty much just work on one thing throughout the day. So, I don't really switch context like that a lot. But I was so despondent at the Wunderlist announcement that all Friday afternoon I wrote a chrome extension that when you open new tab, it opens "Discussing Todo List" that I wrote in VueJs and you know HTML and it uses the chrome sync to sync it across my chrome account to all my laptops whatever...so... every new tab has a todo list, but even that, I was still not happy with it and deleted it and the whole afternoon went with the todo list. Anyway, but I have forgotten about the Chrome extension thing. I need to open source it.

MATT STAUFFER: Every developer has to make their own Todo list at some point in their lives.

TAYLOR OTWELL: Yeah. That's interesting about the calendar though...I want to get Calendly because it looks like a really cool app and try some more calendar stuff 'cos I haven't really dug into that as much as I could.

MATT STAUFFER: Yeah...I use basic Calfor my desktop app, I know that, I think I use Fantastic Cal on the phone or something..a lot of people love that...the thing that we like about Calendly is that it gives me a public link that syncs up to my Google calendar and so when we need to schedule things like we are in the middle of hiring right now or client meetings, I just send them to my calendly link and I just say, go here and schedule time with me and it syncs up with my Google calendar and it shows them all the times and I can say..go schedule a 60 minutes meeting and I give them the 60 minutes link or 5 minutes or whatever and you can put different rules around each.

So I teach calendly when do I drop my son off at school and when do I ...you know drive from my home office to my work office all that kind of stuff...so that it knows when I am available and then..because we just wasted so much time between Dan and me trying to get our calendars in sync. So, that's what I love about Calendly.

TAYLOR OTWELL: What really sold you on basic Cal over like you know just Apple Calendar or whatever?

MATT STAUFFER: I wish I can tell you...I know that it handles multiple calendars better...but it's been so long since I made that choice that I couldn't even tell you. I know that Dan, my business partner hates calendars more than any person I have ever met and almost every time he complains about something, I am like oh yeah, you can do that with Basic Cal and he is like "I still use Apple Calendars" I know those things but I can't tell you what they are..so.

Alright...so one last question before we go for the day. Saeb asked "It would be nice to hear why are guys are programmers. Is it just something you love and enjoy or is it just a way to put bread on the table? Is it passion what is it that makes you wanna be a programmers?"

JEFFREY WAY: I will go first. I fell into it. I think we are being disingenuous if we don't say that to some extent...but I know even from when I was a kid, I love the act of solving puzzles. I remember I had this Sherlock Holmes book and it's one of those things where every single page is some little such and such happens...somebody was murdered and then Sherlock comes, points to so and so and says you are the person who did it. And the last sentence is always..."How did he know?!"

And that was like my favorite book.

I would go through it every day and try to figure out how how did he figure out that this was the guy who...you know...robbed the bank or whatever it happened it be. So, between that or I play guitar for over a decade and I went to school for that. It's all still the same thing of like trying to solve puzzles trying to solve riddles trying to figure out how to connect these things. You may not know it with guitar but the same thing is true, like puzzles and you start learning about shapes on the guitar and how to transpose this to this. And how to play this scale in eight different ways...it's still like the same thing to me it's figuring out how to solve these little puzzles.

And so for programming, I feel like it's the perfect mix of all of that. There needs to ne some level of creativity involved for me to be interested in it....I always worried I would end up in a job where I just did the same and only this thing every single day. And I would finish the day and come back tomorrow and I am gonna do the exact same thing all over again. So there needs to be some level of creativity there which programming does amazingly well or offers amazingly well. Although my mum would never know.

I think she thinks I gave up on music and went to this like boring computer job...and even though when I explain to her like no there is huge amounts of creativity in this I don't think she quite makes the connection of how that is. So, yeah, between the creativity and solving puzzles, and making things, it's a perfect mix for my personality.

TAYLOR OTWELL: I was always really into computers and games and stuffs growing up, so it was pretty natural for me to major you know in IT in college but I didn't really get exposed to the sort of the front side of programming and open source stuff until after college when I started poking around on side projects and stuff like that.

So, I did kind of fall into this side of programming you know, where, you are programming for fun as a hobby and working on open source after I graduated but I was always kind of interested in looking back sort of things that are similar to programming so like into games like SimCity and stuff like that where you are planning out you know, your city and sort of...one of the similar things you do when you are building up big projects or whatever a big enterprise project you know was sort of planning and trying to get... just the right structure whatever, so I was kinda always into that thing. And just sort of naturally fall into that path later in life.

MATT STAUFFER: I...my brother and I started a bulletin boards service...out of our spare bedroom, I mean we were in Elementary or middle school or something like that..and he is 3 and half years older than me and he is a little bit more kind of like intellectual than I am, so, he learned how to code the things and he said why don't you be the designer.

And that kind of trend just kept up. When he learned how to make websites, he be like well, I am gonna make websites and you be the designer. And so I kinda had this internalized idea that A...I was interested in tech..but B, I was the design mind. And the thing is, I am not a very good designer...like the only reason I kept getting into design is because I had like...

I was creative, I was a musician and stuff but also because my brother already had the programming skills down and so he needs a designer right? And so, I think that I went off to college, by that point I already had a job as a programmer, I already had my own clients, doing you know frontend web developments and basic PHP, Wordpress that kind of stuff but I was like well I need to become a better designer so I went off to college for design and I just realized I am not a designer, so I left.

And I went off and I did English and I worked with people and I worked for a non-profit having thought you know like oh that is not my thing and then I kinda did a turn round when I left the non-profit, my wife went back to school and I needed to pay the bills, so it was..there is an element of paying the bills..I say like well I know that web development pays well, so I will go back to that.

And just discovered that I love web development...it is fulfilling and it is satisfying...it is creative...it's using your brain in all this really interesting ways...each one it's a little bit the same, a little bit unique, there is always really great things about it...I mean I remember one of the things that drove me nuts about my previous work..both in design and in working in the non-profit is that there is no sense like whether you did a good job or not.

There is no sense of when something is done. You are just very kinda of vague and vacuous and with this, it's like there is a defined challenge...and you know when it's done. And you know whether you did a good job or not. And I was just like that was huge...that was so foundationally helpful for me.

And so I think just kind of being able to approach it and realize that it's creative..like, it's creative and it is well defined..it's a little concrete..it's a challenge all those things together I think for me..and it turns out that it wasn't just a way to make money and I have also since discovered now that I run a company that I also have all the people aspects here..it's about relationship, it's about communities...I mean we have talked about that a lot in this episode and running a company is about hiring and company culture and all those kind of stuff...

So I get to comment especially at the level of tech that I get to do day to day whether it's open source or running company I feel like it's all of the best together in one word.

JEFFREY WAY: So Matt, how did you go from taking on smaller projects when you went back to web developments to suddenly running Tighten? Like how did you get there? What happened? Were you getting more projects than you can handle?

MATT STAUFFER: The opposite. I...I had no work. I worked out of a co-working space in Chicago and I only had about 10 hours a day, fifteen hours day filled because I didnt know anybody. And I had not been doing anything in the industry for 6 years.

So, I said, you know what? When I worked for non-profit there was this need I had and I still worked for those non-profit's per time at that point, so I just started building an app...I built an app by hand while I worked for the non-profit in PHP and it was terrible. And I was like oh, I have heard about this framework thing, and so I tried building it in CakePHP and it was terrible, and so, those experiences matured me a little bit...and so by the time I was now kinda going solo as a developer, every free moment I would have, outside of the you know, the contract work I had, I would go learn Codeigniter.

You know my buddy Matt had learned ExpressionEngine and said hey, checkout Codeigniter I think you might like it. So I learned Codeigniter and I did all these work in Codeigniter and I built this whole app which is Karani, the thing we are talking about today and I built Karani and I made it for myself and then my friends wanted it and so then I made it for my friends and then it was costing me money to upkeep, so I learned how to charge them money..and Stripe was brand new at that point, so I almost went with Stripe but I ended up going with BrainTree...I got into like big and software as a service app development through there...and right at that same time...

I was teaching my buddy all about modern web development HTML5 boiler plate all that kind of stuff after work one day and this guy walked over...the one guy in my co-working space that I had never met, who was always in his closed office and he was like, are you a developer? Are you looking for work? I was like yeah..and he was like..I need you...would you consider working for me?

I played it all cool but I was like YES..PLEASE I NEED WORK!!! I only have 10 hours of work a week right now. And it was Dan...

And so, Dan and I worked together on this massive project for a year and the client took 6 months to actually get the work ready for us. And he already had me booked and he already had me billed and he was why don't you just go learn become the best possible developer you can..I will throw you know, 30 hours a week jobs just off my various you know various projects...but in all your free time and even in those projects, just learn to become the absolute best, because we were working for, you know, this massive billion dollar international company at that point.

And responsive was like just a thought in people's minds. So, I wrote you know, articles and I created responsive libraries back in the early days of responsive and all those kind of stuff and I was like really up in the middle of it. And then we built this app.

So, I had like a lot of kind of things that took me very quickly from like hey I haven't written any code or any professional code in 6 years to like to the point where I was ready to build an app for this billion dollar company.

JEFFREY WAY: That was amazing. That is how learn best too.

MATT STAUFFER: It really is..and Dan and I loved working together so well that within 6 months we decided to go into business together and 6 months or a year later, we named it Tighten and the rest is history.

MATT STAUFFER: And so, we are super late and Jeffery, you are the one who has to edit this all later, so I apologize for that..so Ok. Future Jeffery, editing this, I am going to do you a favor, call it a day for now so..guys...it's been a ton of fun..everyone who submitted questions to us on Twitter, the ones we didn't get to today, they are still on our trailer board, we will get to some of them next time...

But keep sending us stuff for us to talk about and like I said, the Laravel news podcast is doing a fantastic job of keeping you up to date on regular basis with news so definitely tune in there for that...but we are gonna be talking about more long form stuffs when you got questions for us, send them to us either to our personal accounts or twitter account..for the podcast and we will try to get to them whenever we can..so, until next time..it's Laravel Podcast thanks for listening.

MUSIC fades out...

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Fri, 28 Apr 2017 16:53:00 +0000matt@mattstauffer.co (Taylor Otwell)Taylor Otwell00:53:13In this episode, the crew talks about enterprise applications, scalability, and productivity.
In this episode, the crew talks about enterprise applications, scalability, and productivity.
nofull312Episode 52: Doug Proa389fea7-8dae-4c11-9077-26b926efbaddhttp://www.laravelpodcast.com/13479bf8
In this episode, the crew talks about Mix, Dusk, Laracon US, package development using TestBench, GitLab, and more.
In this episode, the crew talks about Mix, Dusk, Laracon US, package development using TestBench, GitLab, and more.

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Wed, 07 Sep 2016 15:39:00 +0000matt@mattstauffer.co (Taylor Otwell)Taylor Otwell00:37:54In this episode, the crew discusses Laracon US & EU, Laravel 5.3, Laravel's first hire, and the heart-wrenching sense of loss created by Bing Bong's death.
In this episode, the crew discusses Laracon US & EU, Laravel 5.3, Laravel's first hire, and the heart-wrenching sense of loss created by Bing Bong's death.
laravel, php, framework, programmingnofull262Episode 47: Musical Routes89deee5f-dd69-4a2c-8e4d-0d3f74fd2a58http://www.laravelpodcast.com/47f154f5
The crew talks about where the routes file lives, some tantalizing hints of big new 5.3 features, Jeffrey's plan for two hours two times, and Taylor's love for DHH.
The crew talks about where the routes file lives, some tantalizing hints of big new 5.3 features, Jeffrey's 2 sets of 2 hours plan, and Taylor's love for DHH.